Adivce on learning the Hiragana alphabet

[loveassassin13]

Hi, I am a complete newbie when it come to japanese and im working on learning the Hiragana and all the sounds from each letter. Does anyone have any adivice on how ot learn all the sounds. Im just reading over each letter and sound but I dont think im getting anywhere.

[untmdsprt]

I made myself little quizzes in where I had to write each character down on the page in proper order until I finally learned each one.

Here is a chart:




The ん actually goes besides the わ though, not in the "N" column.

http://smart.fm also has online flash cards that will help you with this.

[Yamanchu]

Hi Loveassassin13, if you can find a copy, look for 'Hiragana in 48 minutes' and also 'Katakana in 48 minutes'. I think they sell for about $20-$25 each although some university libraries also have these to look at or loan.

I taught my 13 year old nephew how to read hiragana in an hour one Saturday afternoon. Using these he had it sorted in an hour, piece of cake. Then, the following Saturday, after doing some hiragana revision (and he had remembered it all!), I spent another hour and taught him katakana. Easy, as simple as that, in one hour.

Also, if you can find a copy, I use 'Reading Japanese' by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin. This is great for hiragana, katakana and will teach you about 400 kanji. It's brilliant. The only drawback is that it uses an outdated form of romaji, which is a pity. For example, when they write 'chi' they use the romaji 'ti', the 'tsu' is written as 'tu'. This is a nuisance but once you get used to it this is a brilliant book for learning to read Japanese.

[Tirroth]

If you have a tight budget (and most do right now), you can visit this site:

http://genki.japantimes.co.jp/self/self.en.html

It has free flash cards and a Hiragana/Katakana chart that you can see stroke order and sound. Best of all its free!

Also a good flash card program it help with memorization is this one: http://www.realkana.com/

There is a link on that page also for a kanji program as well. Both are browser based however.

Hope these help!
Tirr

[Tamachan87]

I used the Kana Flashcards from White Rabbit Press and tested myself using Kanatest on Ubuntu. I went from around 60-70% scores to 100% within a month of constant drilling.

Can't seem to find a good equivalent for Windows, though.[/url]

[Javizy]

I started by memorising the first row and writing it out from memory, and then adding rows until I could write the whole thing out. I'm sure if you got a deck for Anki or maybe searched on smart.fm, it'd be much more efficient. It's really not that difficult, although it may seem like it is now, so I wouldn't bother wasting any money on a book, since it will be completely useless within about a week.