How do I learn Hiragana and Katakana?

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How do I learn Hiragana and Katakana?

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I don’t know about Hiragana but to teach myself Hangul while I was on holidays in Korea I just got my little chart of the sounds and a magazine and tried to read it, well, sound it out. After about half an hour I was pretty comfy reading signs and what not.

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Easy :slight_smile: For starters, check out
http://www.easyjapanese.org/write_hiragana.html. Use their quizzes, too.

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for me works: just repeat, repeat, till memorise writing

and have a lot of charts in web to help you

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For everyone else - try this app for Android. It’s easy :slight_smile:
Hiragana : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mlmg.hiragana
Katakana : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mlmg.katakana

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In my opinion, the best way to learn a new script of a language is to write it out. This is coming from someone who has learned various language scripts. You could learn the entire alphabet of Hiragana or Katakana in a night. At least to feel roughly comfortable with it. It isn’t a bad idea to follow the other methods as extra, but quite honestly your main method should be writing it out. Start with 5 letters at a time. Write each letter roughly 20 times (and say the sound out loud each time you write it). So, for example, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, (and from what I understand the sounds aren’t complicated in Japanese). Then when you finish your first letter move to the second letter, B, B, B, B, B, ~20 or so times. Continue until you get 5 letters. Then give yourself a quiz, and try to see if you can remember all 5 letters without looking. For the letters, you can’t remember write it out another 10-15 times and practice your test again. It is a good idea to learn the letters in the order in which they are found in the Japanese alphabet. When you learn those 5 letters, learn the next 5 letters the same way. Then try to see if you can remember all 10 letters. Do this all the way through until you get all 48 letters. When you know all 48 letters and can write them out (and know the sound) over the next week just find words and sentences in the language and work on pronouncing them. You will get about 90% of it but it won’t be perfect. You are just doing this to get practice and to feel more comfortable with the letters and the usage of the language. After about a week or two of this, you can try the next alphabet (Hiragana or whichever one you did first just do the other), and repeat the process. This is how I learned to write characters in Chinese years ago, and since then, I have used this same method to read/write various stages of the Hebrew language/script, Greek, Ugaritic, and cuneiform (some of the syllables) for Hittite. When I begin to learn Japanese, this will be my method for learning the script, and after that I will come back to LingQ to start with the language. It has served me very well with each new script I have learned. For more complicated scripts like Chinese (or Kanji) or syllabaries instead of letters, I only expect to learn about 30-50 a day and practice those for a week before I go past that. Beyond that, you should have no trouble beginning to learn the alphabets of any language and it will then be kind of cool afterward.

Anyways, best of luck, and I hope you haven’t given up on Japanese, or the other Asiatic languages. Best of luck my friend!

-Cody C.

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