LinguaLearn a new alphabet
Every letter with its stroke order, drawn for you and traced by you – free, no account needed. Then the lessons that put the letters into words.
Hiragana: the chart, stroke by stroke
Forty-six characters, each a whole syllable. Learn to read them in a week, to write them in two.
Katakana: the chart, stroke by stroke
The same forty-six syllables as hiragana, in sharper shapes, for the words Japanese borrowed.
Hangul: letters, blocks, stroke order
An alphabet designed in 1443 to be learned in days. Fourteen consonants, ten vowels, and a rule for stacking them.
The Russian alphabet: 33 letters, one week
A third of Cyrillic you can already read. Another third looks familiar and is not. The rest is new – and the whole thing takes a week.
The Vietnamese alphabet and its six tones
Latin letters you can already write, a few marks that change everything, and six tones that make one syllable six words.
The Spanish alphabet: 27 letters, read as written
The Latin alphabet plus ñ – and a language pronounced exactly as it is spelled.
The French alphabet: 26 letters, five accents
The same letters as English – and a different set of rules for turning them into sound.
The German alphabet: 26 letters, three umlauts and ß
The letters you already know, four you do not – and a spelling that, once learned, tells you how to say almost every word.
The Portuguese alphabet: 26 letters and their accents
The letters of English, five marks that change the sound – and the nasal vowels that make Portuguese sound like Portuguese.
The Italian alphabet: 21 letters and their accents
Twenty-one letters, five borrowed ones, a handful of accents – and the double consonants that make Italian sound like Italian.
The English alphabet: 26 letters, many sounds
Twenty-six letters for about forty-four sounds. The letters are the easy part; learning which sound each one makes in a word is the work.