Kanji to Hiragana

A furigana generator places small hiragana above each kanji, keeping both visible (this is the classic ruby-text overlay seen in Japanese children's books and JLPT study materials). This tool does the opposite: it strips the kanji out and gives you ONLY the reading, like turning 毎日コーヒーを飲みます into まいにちコーヒーをのみます. Use furigana when you want to learn kanji while reading; use this converter when you want pure phonetic output for transliteration, song lyrics, or text-to-speech input.

Yes — the output format toggle at the top of the result area lets you switch between hiragana, katakana, and romaji at any time. Katakana output is useful for displaying Japanese text in a sharper, more formal style or for converting native Japanese words to a foreign-loanword style. Romaji output is useful for pronunciation guides, beginner study materials, and international audiences who haven't learned the kana scripts yet.

The tool uses the same kuromoji morphological analyser that powers most Japanese-language software including major IMEs and learning apps. For common vocabulary and standard Japanese text, accuracy is above 98%. Where it sometimes errs is on (1) names — Japanese names have ambiguous readings (use our Name Reader tool for those), (2) very rare or technical kanji, and (3) historical or literary registers. For everyday modern Japanese the output is essentially what a native reader would produce.

When you see kanji like 海 in Japanese text, your brain converts it to the spoken word umi (sea). The hiragana 'うみ' is that pronunciation written out. Hiragana represents the actual sound — it's phonetic. Kanji represents the meaning + sound combined. So converting kanji to hiragana is the same operation your brain performs automatically when you read aloud: extracting the sound from the symbol. This is the foundation skill for JLPT listening tests, which expect you to recognise spoken Japanese without seeing any kanji.

A small number of kanji aren't in the morphological dictionary — usually rare or technical characters. The tool flags these by keeping them as kanji in the output (so you can still see what didn't convert) rather than silently dropping them. If you need a reading for a rare kanji, try the Kanji Chart tool which has individual entries for the JLPT N5–N1 kanji set, or use the Japanese Dictionary for non-JLPT characters.

Yes — three workflows work well. First, paste a sentence from your textbook and check that the reading you produced mentally matches the tool's output. Second, paste a chunk of Japanese from a news article (NHK Easy News works great) and use the hiragana output to practice reading aloud. Third, generate romaji output for vocabulary you want to record in a notebook for pronunciation drilling. For JLPT N3 and above, switching off the romaji output and forcing yourself to read the kana version is the more useful practice mode.