Hiragana is the primary phonetic alphabet in Japanese. It is used to spell Japanese words and is the first set of characters most students learn. The website Easy Japanese has a great memory game for learning Hiragana. Users identify a character and then use their memories to match it to a tile with the same sound written in Roman characters. You need a familiarity with hiragana before you use the game, but it's a great way to reinforce your studies.
Katakana is the second phonetic alphabet in Japanese and is used primarily to represent foreign words. The Japanese language uses a lot of foreign words that are written using the katakana alphabet. Genki English is one of several websites that offer katakana memory games. Flip over cards to identify and different characters that are accompanied by an audio sample. This game is timed, allowing you to work on the speed of your identification.
Kanji is the most complicated and difficult aspect of Japanese for many learners. Kanji are a series of complicated pictographic characters derived from Chinese. Each one represents a different idea or sound and can be combined to form words. Because kanji are used to represent verb and adjective bases and most nouns, memorizing a sufficient number of kanji can be very difficult. The Internet offers a number of memory games for memorizing kanji, such as Kanji Concentration, a game on The Japan Zone website where you identify and match kanji. Detailed explanations for each character are offered.
Smartphones offer an alternative for Japanese memory games. Several apps have been created for the purpose of memorizing Japanese. These apps offer the ability to memorize Japanese on the go and cater to whatever aspect of Japanese you're trying to learn. Kanjipop is one of several iTunes memory game apps. Users are presented with an English words and phonetic spellings, which they then have to match to one of several kanji characters that appear below. Every successful round moves you up to the next level of difficulty, but if you fail to identify all the characters in time, you are sent back a level.