These are the best Japanese Hirangana and Katakana learning apps for the iPhone.

iKana Touch $6 covers all of hiragana / katakana combinations (Dakuon and Handakuon). You can toggle off romaji in the flash cards. So the above screenshot with bo the bo (boku) and (boro) won't be shown if romaji is set to off. Displays stroke order animation for each one by flipping card over. Can listen to the pronunciation of each kana. Practice sets you can add up to a maximum of 60 at a time. It'll give you five seconds to identify the correct romaji for the hiragana / katakana. It keeps track of your recent wrong ones for review too. If you get it wrong it'll show you correct answer in green. Also allows you to practice writing the kana. Now this isn't recognition like you would be doing on a Japanese Nintendo DS but rather a simple one that just detects if your going from one circle to the next in the correct stroke order. Overall an extremely polished and well thought out title.

HiKaChan Hiragana Japanese $3 and HiKaChan Katakana Japanese $3 uses illustrations to help you memorize hiragana. I'm personally not into this method but it must work for some. Although some of them are really stretching it in my opinion to make a vague connection. Doesn't cover " small o only as a quick reference chart. Press the sound icon to hear pronunciation . There are a few say about 5 or 6 that sounded off to my wife and I though as opposed to iKana Touch all of them sounded spot on. Character Quiz is pretty decent offering six multiple choices. However, it's just random so impossible to review wrong ones or choose which ones you'd like. Reading Comprehension is a quiz too but is I'm gonna guess has less than 80 or so entries. Went through to about 50 and I had quite a bit of repeats which isn't too good. I guess if your into learning by illustrations these two titles might be worth looking into. Has decent quiz albeit without way to track progress. Has stroke order for hiragana. It shows an illustration (not animated) with the numbers showing order. If needs be little arrows also point which direction. Only in linear order so you need to swipe through them alphabetically to see. Would be nice if you could access stroke order illustration by flipping over the hiragana card.

Kana Flip $5 hiragana and katakana. These are included in Kanji Flip $6 so if you think you'll end up getting Kanji Flip you might just spring for that one. Advantage of Kana Flip is you can do just Hiragana or just Katakana but other than that Kanji Flip contains the hiragana / katakana in addition to the 2230 Kanji. For initially learning just turn on browse mode which allows you to scroll through them in alphabetical order a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ki, ke, ko, kya, kyu...... then ga, gi, gu, ge, go, gya, gyu, gyo, za, etc... In quiz mode just press middle of screen to reveal answer and truthfully answer Right or Wrong. If you answer Wrong it'll repeat every so often till you get it Right.

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