Bryce is Learning Japnanese -- Part II

Yesterday’s post was about Rosetta Stone, which has been my primary tool for learning Japanese. As I mentioned, it is a great program for developing comprehension, pronunciation, and vocabulary skills, but is a bit lacking in terms of getting a good grasp of Japanese alphabets. Today I will discuss a few tools and strategies that I have used to learn the Hiragana alphabet. I plan to continue using these strategies in my studies of Katakana.

In case you are unfamiliar with the three alphabets that the Japanese language makes use of, here is a link to a wikipedia page that is useful. In a nutshell, the first alphabet, Kanji, is the oldest form of writing in Japanese and is based on Chinese logographic characters. In this system, each symbol denotes a particular word and therefore, there are thousands of characters to learn. At this point, I know none of them. The more modern alphabets are phonetic and are both made up of 46 characters (and much easier to learn than kanji). Hiragana is the first alphabet that most students of the Japanese language learn. Katakana is made up of the same phonetic sounds as Hiragana, but uses different symbols to represent them. It is my understanding that Katakana is used primarily to denote foreign words and concepts.

As you can see from any chart of Hiragana symbols, the language makes use of 5 vowel sounds (all of which should be familiar to English speakers) and combines them with various consonant sounds. Each row from the chart is comprised of one consonant sound, while each column stems from a particular vowel sound. My goal when learning each of these symbols was to memorize one new row each day. Theoretically, I should have been able to have learned the entire alphabet in 10 days. It didn’t exactly happen that way, but I found that in 2 or 3 days, 15 symbols was quite manageable.

As for how to learn these alphabets, my philosophy is, “writing is remembering.” I need to write symbols down if I am to remember them. Just like anything else, this takes practice. A typical study session would look something like this:

1. I review the symbols that I already know by writing the alphabet as far as I can a few times.
2. I choose 5 symbols that correspond to a particular vowel sound and I write an entire line of the first symbol from this set. Then I do the same with the other 4 symbols.
3. I will then come up with patterns to write these symbols in – usually repeating each symbol 3-5 times. I gradually reduce the repetitions until I can write each symbol from this particular set.
4. To finish off, I write out the alphabet as far as I can (including the new symbols). I do this 3 or 4 times.

It is important to sound out each character as you are writing them – preferably out loud, but in your head is a good substitute). This will help build associations between the image, the sound, and the pronunciations.

That’s about all there is to it. This session will usually take me about 10-20 minutes. If it seems simple, it’s because it is. Do this everyday, and you will be able to have the entire alphabet memorized in about 10 days. If you’re like me, it will probably take you a bit longer as you will miss days. If I missed a day, it’s still easy to take out a piece of paper during your lunch break at work and write out the alphabet as review – this might only take 5 minutes.

Although this exercise may seem a bit elementary, the writing of these characters was essential to my learning. This was because I had only ever studied languages in English and a little bit in French. I had only ever worked with the 26 symbols that make up our alphabet. The mere action of forming these new characters was quite difficult for me at first. As I got accustomed to forming these new shapes, I found that I was much better equipped to recognize them in my reading.

Here are some sites that I also found useful for learning and reviewing Japanese alphabets:

http://www.yosida.com/en/hiragana.html -→ I like this site because clicking on a particular character provides a demonstration of how to form the symbol.

These sites will help review what you already know, but I didn’t find them very helpful in terms of learning new material.
http://www.realkana.com/hiragana/
http://www.easyjapanese.org/
http://www.manythings.org/japanese/
http://www.bitboost.com/tiletag/about-the-kana.html