Kana Dojo

A personal Hiragana/Katakana learning app, built for handwriting practice with an iPad and Apple Pencil.

Features

• Learn — full Hiragana/Katakana chart (including dakuten/handakuten) with animated, correct stroke order for every character, sourced from KanjiVG.
• Practice — handwrite characters on canvas (mouse, touch, or Apple Pencil via Pointer Events) and get an instant percentage match against the correct stroke shapes, with a visual overlay showing exactly which strokes were off. Scoring runs entirely client-side using Dynamic Time Warping against KanjiVG's real stroke path data — no external API calls.
• Quiz — multiple-choice drills, kana → romaji and romaji → kana, for Hiragana, Katakana, or both.

Handwriting dictation (play a word, write it, get scored) is planned as a follow-up phase and will reuse the same stroke-scoring engine.

Development

pnpm install
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

To regenerate the bundled kana stroke dataset (src/data/kana-strokes.json) from KanjiVG:

node scripts/generate-kana-data.mjs

Deploy on Vercel

npx vercel

Or connect the repo at vercel.com/new — no environment variables are required, everything runs client-side against the bundled kana dataset.

Attribution

Stroke order data is from KanjiVG by Ulrich Apel, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.