Himari: Hiragana & Katakana Live

You probably already know the Japanese word for cat. Most apps will have you answer it "neko". Himari asks you for ねこ. That gap is the whole app. You see the cat drawn, you hear ねこ said out loud, and you write it back in kana, on the 12 key keyboard your phone already has and Japan actually uses. English appears as little as it can, because every line of it is a line you spend not reading Japanese. The pictures do the explaining instead. That cat was painted for that word. So was every other picture here, and so were the streets you walk down, the manga pages that close each chapter, and the music playing quietly underneath all of it. Nothing in Himari was borrowed from anywhere. Himari and Sora have just graduated, and you are their first student. A fox called Kon is asleep in the road, and he is coming with you. TYPE IT THE WAY JAPAN TYPES IT Japanese phones write kana on a 12 key flick grid, the T9 shape your thumb already knows. Tapping romaji buttons in a quiz feels like typing Japanese, and it is a skill that stops at the edge of the app. So Himari asks for the real thing. When your answers keep arriving in romaji she stops the lesson, tells you why, and walks you through adding the keyboard with the exact steps for your phone. One minute, once. Romaji still counts, always, and nobody is held up for not having a keyboard yet. But by the end of the course you are writing ねこ into your own phone, and that keeps working after you close this one. TEACHERS AT YOUR SIDE You pick Himari or Sora at the start, and they stay with you from the first card to the last seal. They react to every answer you give, they tell you when you have it, and they say something kind when you do not. A FOX WHO GROWS AS YOU DO Kon walks home with you after every session. As your kana add up he grows, earns a second tail by the end of the course, and learns tricks that he shows off when he feels like it. He is the one progress bar worth looking forward to. TEN CHAPTERS, TEN PLACES Five new words a chapter, and all 46 letters of the hiragana alphabet across the ten of them. Each chapter is somewhere you stand for a while: a classroom, a convenience store at night, a hanami under the cherry trees. Each one closes with a hand drawn manga page and a seal you press yourself. An animated film opens the app, and seventeen pieces of music play under the rest of it. THEN THE SAME WORDS, IN KANJI Finish hiragana and a kanji course opens behind it. It does not start you over. It takes the words you already know and shows you the character behind each one: you know ねこ, so here is 猫. Reading it is the whole exercise, and it never asks you to write one from memory. It costs nothing, like the hiragana course it grew out of. AND KATAKANA, WHEN YOU WANT IT Katakana is a second course with its own city, its own story and its own two guides, Rin and Hiro. It is there whenever you are ready, whether that is your first evening or the day after your last hiragana chapter. The first chapter is free. Opening the rest is one purchase, once, with no subscription and nothing else to buy. START FROM NOTHING Himari is built for complete beginners. It opens on the first letter of the hiragana alphabet and assumes nothing before it. You learn Japanese from there. IT REMEMBERS FOR YOU Every kana and every word comes back for practice on its own timetable, just before you would have forgotten it. Come back after two weeks away and Himari does not hand you a backlog of hundreds. It picks one honest session, quietly reschedules the rest, and says nothing about the arithmetic. QUIETLY PRIVATE • Fully offline. There is no server, no account, and no login of any kind. • No analytics, no tracking, no advertising, no third party SDKs. • No identifier is created for you, not even an anonymous one. • Your progress lives in one file on your device, and you can export it whenever you like. Kon is still asleep in the road, and the first card is a cat. Go and read it.