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Results may vary, but I found learning hiragana and katakana to be the easiest part of learning Japanese. Everything else is where I seem to be struggling. ;)
I thought I’d share some of the tools that really helped me. Since I learned them before I started Textfugu I taught myself katakana first. This worked really well for me because of this website (Best to have the volume down):
http://www.manythings.org/japanese/kana/
Specifically I used the following two flash apps. The first link is no better than Anki, actually it’s probably worse, but the second did something wonderful to help me learn katakana. It had reasonably well known American movies written as they were written in katakana. It then gave me 5 possible answers in English. This meant that I could only partially know the answer, guess the correct one, and still feel the satisfaction and encouragement needed to move forward. Over time I found I knew more and more answers, and I learned some of the subtle ways katakana is applied to English.
http://www.manythings.org/q/kana.php?u=katakana
http://www.manythings.org/flvb/movies1.htmlAfter feeling solid with katakana I moved on to hiragana and used similar flash application on the manythings.org site. None of them worked as well as that katakan/movie quiz, but it got the job done.
What I found when I went to Japan was that the kanas can be written in a lot of different fonts. This means sometimes a kana you know really well won’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before, or worse it will look like a different kana. Fonts! Why didn’t I think to study that before traveling. ;)
The good news is there is a great Droid app that quizzes you on kana, and randomly changes fonts while it is quizzing you. It has plain fonts, fonts that look like handwriting, and fonts that look weird cool and futurey. You may or may not feel the need to learn this stuff early on, but you’ll want it at some point. There are two different apps, one for hiragana, and one for katakana, and they are both free. Here are some links:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.casmogames.JapaneseHiragana&hl=en (Master Hiragana)
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.casmogames.JapaneseKatakana&hl=en (Master Katakana)I can’t recommend those two apps enough.
頑張って
Thank you very much for recommendations! Android apps are not compatible with my phone *waves fist to the sky*, but movie titles in katakana are great!
When I started studying Japanese I had a week to learn all Hiragana and a week to learn all Katakana. I did it! What really helped me, and this is very silly, but very helpful actually, were pictoral explanations of the sounds. You can probably find them online as well, they will all be a little different.
The little stories for a first time learner are an amazing help. Some I had to make up my own because the ones I was given didn’t associate as well with the kana. The basic idea is to have a picture explanation of how the kana *looks* where the first *sound* of the explanation is the sound of the kana. For example: う is a grandmother bending over, holding her back, saying “ooooh.” And so on and so forth
Bottom line is I found those invaluable and still remember most kana (even without practice) because of them, and if you don’t find one that works quite right, I’d be happy to share what I’ve collected. :)
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This reply was modified 13 years ago by
Svetlana.
Yah. I’ve been learning using Nakama at uni, and it’s got little mnemonics for all of the kana. I learnt katakana and hiragana in an afternoon each, and spent the next week or so mastering them enough to retire the mnemonics from my memory. Trouble is, it’s an American textbook, so I need to think in an American accent – for example, the mnemonic for ya is a yacht, but here in Australia we pronounce yacht as “yot”.
(Still, that’s better than some websites I’ve seen that say “o is pronounced to rhyme with ‘bow’.” Um, which ‘bow’? There’s two ways to pronounce that, and really neither of them are very close to the Japanese ‘o’ sound anyway.)
I know what you mean, some of them are universal sounds I think, but some of them I actually made up my own example exactly for that reason, it was obscure or just not memorable enough. Overall though I have to say that’s what did it for me in terms or memorizing everything and quickly, and it’s still all there. I think it’s because it utilizes visual+audio+writing+speaking learning all at the same time. well for me it did anyway.
I found two sites that kind of give examples of that…for people who have never seen it before :)
http://japanese.gatech.edu/WebCTVista/JAPN1001/contents/Lesson02/hiragana/mnemonic-hiragana.html
I think there’s two stages to learning hiragana and katakana, first there’s being able to match them all up on a drag and drop exercise, then there’s being able to read them easily and at a good pace. I was able to learn hiragana and katakana within a few days but actually reading them fast took longer. I can’t read katakana quite as fast yet since I’ve had much less practice with it.
I can read hiragana as fast as the regular alphabet now. I’m gonna have to step up my katakana game, there’s about 3 characters that can sometimes trick me.
You mean シ/ツ and ソ/ン?
Actually, one that occasionally throws me is サ/せ…
The shi/tsu ones are indeed annoying!
I used “Kana Pict-O-Graphix” by Michael Rawley, $6 on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Kana-Pict—Graphix-Mnemonics-Japanese/dp/1880656183/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326061644&sr=1-1
About 3″ by 5″, easy to carry around.I found these iPhone apps very helpful:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dr.-mokus-hiragana-mnemonics/id387585135?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dr.-mokus-katakana-mnemonics/id452226776?mt=8
There are free versions to try to see if you like the method.
I learned how to read Hiragana/Katakana in a few days with the free JA Sensei app on android (http://goo.gl/ZfJb9). It’s probably on IOS too though.
I orginally learned the kana using Kana de Manga, but I can’t really recommend it to anyone, seeing as there are so many free alternatives online. In order to try and read them faster, though, I use QuickKana, a webpage that cycles through kana at a preset speed.
I highly recommend Kana LS Touch for IOS devices. Definitely worth the money (only $4) and the creator is a very nice person. I never use it anymore but I used the Kanji Ls Touch IOS app by the same creator. Amazing app for Kanji. I know koichi recommends not spending much time on learning how to write Kanji but for me when I remember how to write them they are locked in my memory for good and I can read them with ease.
As Tim Bess recommended, JA Sensei app on android is really good. And Obenkyo on android is also amazing.
Tim Bess, did you pay for JA Sensei? I am considering paying to unlock the other features. Mainly for the writing of kanji.
@ Daniel
JA Sensei is free on Android. There is no paid for version as far as I’m aware. It’s a great app. I included it in the thread you made. -
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