kana-trainer

Trainer for the hiragana and katakana alphabets, on desktop, tablet and phone. Built with Tauri 2 and Svelte 5, in cream paper and black ink.

See the roadmap for planned features and improvements.

Features

• Hiragana, katakana or both, in either direction, from single characters up to all 147 including the dakuon, handakuon and yoon rows, plus the katakana only tokushon
• Three question formats (text to text, audio to text, text to audio) and answers by multiple choice or typing
• Runs of 10 to 500 questions or one pass over the set, at three difficulty levels that decide how look alike the wrong answers are
• Optional time trial, per question and for the whole run.
• Chart view of every character grouped by sound type and row, tap a tile to hear it
• Score reports saved on disk, exported and imported as .kt-report files holding any number of runs. Easy migration of runs to other devices.
• Responsive interface, the same app on a wide screen and on a phone
• Localization for 11 languges: Dutch, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese (simplified and traditional).
• Support for WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility, including high contrast mode, screen reader support and keyboard navigation.
• Works on Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android.

Installing

Manually

https://arsalan-anwari.github.io/kana-trainer/

sudo dnf install ./kana-trainer-*.rpm            # fedora, opensuse
sudo apt install ./kana-trainer_*.deb            # debian 13+, ubuntu 24.04+
sudo pacman -U ./kana-trainer-*.pkg.tar.zst      # arch

Or run apk/exe/dmg package with your OS package installer.

From crates.io

cargo install kana-trainer

Development

Needs Node 22+ and Rust 1.77+, plus the GTK and WebKit development headers.

# fedora
sudo dnf install webkit2gtk4.1-devel gtk3-devel glib2-devel librsvg2-devel \
                 libsoup3-devel openssl-devel dbus-devel patchelf \
                 libappstream-glib rpm-build dpkg

# debian, ubuntu
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev libglib2.0-dev librsvg2-dev \
                 libsoup-3.0-dev libssl-dev libdbus-1-dev patchelf \
                 build-essential curl wget file rpm

# arch
sudo pacman -S webkit2gtk-4.1 gtk3 glib2 librsvg libsoup3 openssl dbus \
               patchelf base-devel rpm-tools

rpm-build/rpm/rpm-tools and dpkg are only needed for the .rpm and .deb bundle targets, patchelf for bundling in general. On Arch dpkg comes from the AUR.

git submodule update --init   # vendor/kaizen-ui, the UI kit
npm ci
npm run tauri:dev      # run the app against the vite dev server
npm run tauri:build    # bundle for the current platform
npm test               # unit tests
npm run test:e2e       # playwright

Keyboard Shortcuts

Desktop only. Press Ctrl+/ to start keyboard mode and Ctrl+Shift+/ to stop it; outside the mode these shortcuts do nothing. A badge in the top left shows when the mode is on. Press ? anywhere for a list of shortcuts.

Shift+up and Shift+down walk between sections; the current section is outlined in blue. Tab and Shift+Tab navigation only works in the active section.

Menus and pages

During a run

Credits

• Character sounds from FUN Japanese Learning (CC BY 4.0). Upload available on Hugging Face.