Kotonoha Tango (ことのはたんご)
A Japanese Wordle: find the day's five-kana word in ten tries.
Every day: One Japanese word of five kana a day, the same for every player, with ten tries. New puzzle: The in-game countdown runs to midnight on your device clock.
Kotonoha Tango (ことのはたんご) is a Japanese version of Wordle that you can play once a day. You have ten tries to find a five-character word written in kana, and the answer is shared by all players. The site warns that it is a good deal harder than the English original.
About Kotonoha Tango (ことのはたんご)
Kotonoha Tango was made as a Japanese version of Wordle, and its own description calls it a word-guessing puzzle you play once a day. The answer is common to all users, and the page asks players to avoid spoilers. It is published on plum-chloride.jp, with bug reports taken on GitHub and on the author's Twitter account, plum_chloride.
Each puzzle is a word of five kana, and each guess must be a five-kana word in the game's dictionary. You have ten tries rather than six, because Japanese has many more characters than the Latin alphabet. After each try the tiles change colour to show which characters are in the word and in the right place, which are in the word elsewhere, and which are absent. Answers can include loanwords and words that repeat a character, and are mostly nouns: verbs and adjectives cannot be entered.
A memo mode, switched on with the pencil at the top, lets you mark characters on the keyboard with circles and crosses as you rule them in or out. The keyboard can be shown in the fifty-sound order, with a separate set for voiced marks, and you can switch between katakana and hiragana. After the game, the site shows the share of players who solved it and their average number of tries, and you can share a result that only reveals your words to people who have finished.
The dictionary draws on UniDic and the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics word list. It suits Japanese speakers and serious learners who want a harder daily word puzzle.
How to play Kotonoha Tango (ことのはたんご)
- Enter a five-kana word from the on-screen keyboard and submit it.
- Read the colours: one marks a kana in the right place, another a kana in the word but elsewhere, and grey a kana not in the word.
- Turn on memo mode with the pencil if you want to mark kana as in or out.
- Find the word within ten tries, or give up to see it.
- Check the day's statistics and share your result.
Tips
- Small kana such as ョ and ュ count as their own characters, so long sounds and contracted sounds use up positions.
- Answers are mostly nouns and can be loanwords, so try a katakana loanword when native words stop fitting.
- Use memo mode to keep track of ruled-out kana; the keyboard has many more keys than an alphabet.
Questions
How many tries do I get?
Ten.
Is the word the same for everyone?
Yes. The page says the answer is common to all users.
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Dordle
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