Japanese characters/sounds

 iTunes - Apps - search (Japanese)

Japanese has three characters: ひらがな(hiragana),かたかな(katakana),and 漢字(がんじ)(kanji). As I know, hiragana is for writing Japanese words, katakana is for writing words that comes from other languages such as English, and kanji is Chinese characters that used to present the meaning of hiragana. 

I learned Japanese in my high school before, but I forgot almost everything. These two Apps on iTune helped me review the hiragana and katakana. And they are FREE (the second one has more lessons for paid version). I searched 'Japanese' under 'education' in Applications on iTune to find them.

This one only have hiragana and katakana. When I use it, it helped me focus on hiragana and katakana. And the content is almost the same as the one below.

There are sections including lessons, study cards, flashcards, quizzes, and study bank.

This one have a bit more to learn for beginners other than hiragana and katakana, for example, some basic grammars, conversation words, and counting in Japanese. I was using this one at the beginning for reviewing my hiragana and katakana. Then I realized I should not look at anything else before I'm fully done with hiragana and katakana. So it depends on the needs.

I had problem to pronounce し(shi),ち(chi),つ(tsu),て(te), and ふ(fu). So I listen how my iTouch 'pronounce' them again and agian both a single character and in a word. And read how it sounds like in English. Also my teacher helped me a lot on it. he told me, 'shi' pronounces like the 'sh' of 'she', and 'fu' is actually pronounce more like 'hu' by Japanese.

No matter how to learn it, hiragana and katakana are the basis of learning Japanese.
This is the chart of Hiragana and katakana: