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I learned hiragana and katakana by drilling RealKana [0], together with the Flash-based Drag-n-Drops [1] back when Flash was still a thing. It looks like the or

by Twisol 3y ago

I learned hiragana and katakana by drilling RealKana [0], together with the Flash-based Drag-n-Drops [1] back when Flash was still a thing. It looks like the original author of [1] has non-Flash versions now [2]. RealKana is great for drilling recognition (kana -> pronunciation), and I learned the individual kana by loading one column at a time (e.g. ka/ki/ku/ke/ko). Drag-n-Drop is good for speed-testing recognition, but also for recall (pronunciation -> kana), since it's invertible: you can either choose a pronunciation and go find its kana, or choose a kana and find which pronunciation it goes to. I'm not sure you can really "learn" these characters without drilling like this -- the symbols are arbitrary, so you have to memorize the association between glyph and reading by brute force. [0] https://realkana.com/ https://realkana.com/ [1] https://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects/genki/hira_main.html https://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects/genki/hira_main.... [2] https://ohelo.github.io/usagi-chan/katakana/ https://ohelo.github.io/usagi-chan/katakana/

userbinator 3y ago
There are some patterns in hiragana that can make them a little easier to memorise; e.g. はばぱほぼぽふぶぷへべぺ
- Twisol 3y ago
  Yes -- the dakuten and handakuten marks are very systematic modifiers of the readings of the underlying glyphs. The dakuten more or less voices the leading syllable (ka -> ga, ta -> da), and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. From my perspective, you only really need to learn the base kana and remember the rule for the modifying marks -- you're not learning entire new kana after that. (There's also combinations like kyu = ki + small-yu, but that also just builds on the kana you already know, and behaves pretty logically.)
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. Modification to /p/ might make more sense if you call it the F*-column rather than the H*-column.
    - Twisol 3y ago
      Yeah, the F* to B* already is a bit weird -- if anything; B* is the voiced version of P*, and they're both just hanging off of F* / H*.
    - tasogare 3y ago
      [dead]
astrobe_ 3y ago
Hiragana and katakana are just the very easy parts of written Japanese - it's merely like learning Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard. However, unlike western writing systems, there's also a third thing which is not an alphabet: Kanji. And this is a world of troubles, because Kanji is literally FUBAR. So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then. Korea used to use Chinese characters too, they eventually (mostly) dropped them in favor of something simpler.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries. Japanese words are lengthy compared to English as well. Kanji packs more content into less space. I agree that the existence of “rare kanji” is a bit strange, but 8,000 or so characters seems reasonable, especially with so many compound kanji.
  - filmor 3y ago
    From my understanding, there are some words that are usually written in Hiragana anyhow (which always confuses me when that word contains a は). I don't think it would hurt to replace usage of Kanji by introduction of visible word boundaries, where necessary.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    >How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries. They could just start using spaces. They use the button anyway to cycle through the different kanji that they've typed out in kana or latin. In latin script text we recognize words as "symbols" of the language. Words might be composed of characters, but you don't read them one character at a time. You see the start, the shape, and the end of word. Based on that you know what word it is and what it means. You can raed scrmabled text withuot isseus. Japanese would gain the same kind of recognition if it were only written in hiragana and katakana. It already has that anyway. You don't scrutinize whether it is the actual correct kanji. If it looks close enough it's good enough. I think a bigger potential problem would be homophones. Japanese words seem to like using the same sounds for a lot of different meanings. (I wonder if that's why their language has so many English loan words.) I think it's definitely possible, but it's up to them. Having a harder language isn't necessarily a bad thing.
totetsu 3y ago
I learned them initially using a rpg game about a potato farmer. Slime forest adventure. https://lrnj.com/ https://lrnj.com/
atomicfiredoll 3y ago
I'll give a couple of these a shot, but I also really have to recommend the spaced repetition Anki provides for drills. There are a lot of community created decks [0] for different aspects of Japanese. And for some reason, creating your own deck for topics or vocabulary really seems to help with memorization. I can say that after just over three weeks I'm sounding out words. I think hours practiced are a better measure than weeks, but I don't know how many hours I've spent. (Even then sleep seems vital to processing the material, so you can't probably can't just count straight hours you've spent cramming.) My study has involved using this deck [1]; writing out the hiragana and katakana charts several times; and using Tofugu [2][3] or YouTube for mnemonics, extra explanation, or stroke order. [0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese [1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/827975112 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/827975112 [2] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ [3] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/
- atomicfiredoll 3y ago
  For anybody that stumbles on this, I'll note the Anki deck I'm using didn't have audio for the hiragana and katakana combination character cards. Audio is extremely useful for these, so I generated it using the Hyper TTS Add-On[0]. [0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/111623432 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/111623432

by Twisol 3y ago

userbinator 3y ago

There are some patterns in hiragana that can make them a little easier to memorise; e.g. はばぱほぼぽふぶぷへべぺ

Twisol 3y ago
Yes -- the dakuten and handakuten marks are very systematic modifiers of the readings of the underlying glyphs. The dakuten more or less voices the leading syllable (ka -> ga, ta -> da), and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. From my perspective, you only really need to learn the base kana and remember the rule for the modifying marks -- you're not learning entire new kana after that. (There's also combinations like kyu = ki + small-yu, but that also just builds on the kana you already know, and behaves pretty logically.)
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. Modification to /p/ might make more sense if you call it the F*-column rather than the H*-column.
  - Twisol 3y ago
    Yeah, the F* to B* already is a bit weird -- if anything; B* is the voiced version of P*, and they're both just hanging off of F* / H*.
  - tasogare 3y ago
    [dead]

astrobe_ 3y ago

Hiragana and katakana are just the very easy parts of written Japanese - it's merely like learning Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard. However, unlike western writing systems, there's also a third thing which is not an alphabet: Kanji. And this is a world of troubles, because Kanji is literally FUBAR. So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then. Korea used to use Chinese characters too, they eventually (mostly) dropped them in favor of something simpler.

geraldwhen 3y ago
How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries. Japanese words are lengthy compared to English as well. Kanji packs more content into less space. I agree that the existence of “rare kanji” is a bit strange, but 8,000 or so characters seems reasonable, especially with so many compound kanji.
- filmor 3y ago
  From my understanding, there are some words that are usually written in Hiragana anyhow (which always confuses me when that word contains a は). I don't think it would hurt to replace usage of Kanji by introduction of visible word boundaries, where necessary.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  >How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries. They could just start using spaces. They use the button anyway to cycle through the different kanji that they've typed out in kana or latin. In latin script text we recognize words as "symbols" of the language. Words might be composed of characters, but you don't read them one character at a time. You see the start, the shape, and the end of word. Based on that you know what word it is and what it means. You can raed scrmabled text withuot isseus. Japanese would gain the same kind of recognition if it were only written in hiragana and katakana. It already has that anyway. You don't scrutinize whether it is the actual correct kanji. If it looks close enough it's good enough. I think a bigger potential problem would be homophones. Japanese words seem to like using the same sounds for a lot of different meanings. (I wonder if that's why their language has so many English loan words.) I think it's definitely possible, but it's up to them. Having a harder language isn't necessarily a bad thing.

totetsu 3y ago

I learned them initially using a rpg game about a potato farmer. Slime forest adventure. https://lrnj.com/ https://lrnj.com/

atomicfiredoll 3y ago

I'll give a couple of these a shot, but I also really have to recommend the spaced repetition Anki provides for drills. There are a lot of community created decks [0] for different aspects of Japanese. And for some reason, creating your own deck for topics or vocabulary really seems to help with memorization. I can say that after just over three weeks I'm sounding out words. I think hours practiced are a better measure than weeks, but I don't know how many hours I've spent. (Even then sleep seems vital to processing the material, so you can't probably can't just count straight hours you've spent cramming.) My study has involved using this deck [1]; writing out the hiragana and katakana charts several times; and using Tofugu [2][3] or YouTube for mnemonics, extra explanation, or stroke order. [0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese [1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/827975112 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/827975112 [2] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ [3] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/

atomicfiredoll 3y ago
For anybody that stumbles on this, I'll note the Anki deck I'm using didn't have audio for the hiragana and katakana combination character cards. Audio is extremely useful for these, so I generated it using the Hyper TTS Add-On[0]. [0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/111623432 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/111623432