Learn Kanji or hiragana/katakana first?

[pradagirl0530]

Hi everyone! I've been working on lessons for about a month now, and I am not having a lot of luck learning the Kanji and Kana. Is it better to try to learn the Kana first and then the Kanji, or the other way around? Does anyone have any suggestions on this? Is the best way to learn both just by repetition? Thanks for your help!

[Yamanchu]

Hi pradagirl0530. I'd definately start with the kana first. I wouldn't even think of kanji til your fairly confident with kana. You'll only get confused otherwise. The best book I've found is called: 'Reading Japanese'. It uses the old style romaji, which is a pain, but otherwise it's fantastic. A great way for learning all the kana and the first 400 or so kanji.

[Javizy]

The nature of kanji means you'll probably never stop learning them in some way or another, whereas you can become proficient with kana in a couple of weeks. There are few enough kana to learn through rote memorisation. Kanji, on the other hand, are much more complicated and greater in number, so you need a decent system to avoid making the whole process a never-ending nightmare.

I recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji for kanji, along with Anki for reviewing (great for vocabulary, and memorising just about anything, incidentally). You can find a lot of good stuff about learning kanji in this way at this forum http://forum.koohii.com/index.php. I really recommend at least giving this a try before you start writing out characters hundreds of times, you can really save yourself a lot of frustration!