How I Learned Hiragana in One Night

Not to sound corny, but I learned hiragana in one night, and you can, too! ;)

Here's what I did. We have the Japanese Hiragana Handwriting app for our tablet (Android only). It's basically a finger-tracing flashcard app. I went through all of the hiragana several times, tracing the characters, pressing the button to hear the name of the character, and then saying the character out loud. Once I had a good feel for each character (even though I hadn't memorized any of them yet), I got rid of the arrows that show which direction your finger goes to draw the character. Using my hand, I then covered up the name of each character as I flipped through them, and tried to guess which character it was. Note that I first did this in alphabetical order! Once I started remembering the pattern, it got too easy, so I pressed the dice button to make each character pop up randomly, and then I would jog my memory to see if I knew which character I was looking at. I began to realize that...I had them memorized!! I immediately got online and started browsing my favorite Japanese websites to try to read the characters "in context". All of this was just to reinforce what I had learned so I wouldn't forget it all right away. I also made sure to go over the characters again the next day and the next day.

I also highly suggest looking at each character and trying to think of and picture something that will help you remember what character it is. For example, if you turn the character "ho" (ほ) sideways, it looks like an underlined h-o! And the character "ra" (ら) looks like a number 5, so I imagine cheerleaders saying, "Ra! Ra! Number 5! Ra! Ra!" Even if it seems silly, just use whatever first pops into your head to remember the character (don't worry, you don't have to blog about it if you don't want to ;) ). This little trick really helped me out. You won't need to use it once you have all the characters well-practiced and well-memorized.

Now, if you don't have a phone or tablet that has Android, there's a couple other things you can do.

Option A: You can check out this website that has online hiragana flashcards (you need Java, which is not a big deal). If you click "label", you'll see the name of each character as you click through. Click "don't label" to turn off the names. If you click "forget", it removes the character from your "deck" of cards and drills you on the ones you're still learning. "Reset", of course, puts all the cards back in the deck. Unfortunately, the cards are not in alphabetical order, but they do link to a chart that has all the hiragana in alphabetical order, if you want to practice there first.

Option B: Another option is to print out some hiragana worksheets and practice drawing the characters over and over. You could then either test yourself by using the above resource, or you could simply use your worksheets as flashcards.

After you have the hiragana memorized, the diacritics, or those little lines and circles that show up over hiragana, are fairly easy to learn. Just remember that the diacritics are like a "softened" version of their hiragana cousins. So all the "k" sounds turn into "g" sounds ("ka" becomes the more nasally sounding "ga"), "s" sounds turn into "z" sounds, and "t" sounds turn into "d" sounds. "H" sounds turn into "b" or "p" sounds.

The digraphs are fairly simple as well. A digraph takes two hiragana characters -- any sound plus a "y" sound -- and puts them together, with the "y" sound on the right and a little smaller. So if you put "ki" (き) and "ya" (や) together, the "ya" being smaller and on the right side of the "ki", you get "kya" (きゃ). Now "s" characters are a little different, because they become s-h instead of s-y (like "sha" しゃ). "T" characters are also funky, because they don't become t-h or t-y; they become c-h (like "cha" ちゃ). "Z" characters also undergo an interesting metamorphosis, becoming "j" sounds, such as "ja" (じゃ).

I know it all sounds a bit confusing (okay, REALLY confusing!), but once you get your feet wet, it's way easier than it looks! And you know what? It's extremely satisfying to have one of the Japanese alphabets memorized. A whole new world seems to open up when you realize that you're actually reading in Japanese! If this works for you, you can definitely tackle katakana in the same way. But hiragana is the most important to learn, because katakana is usually used for western or foreign words, and even if you see kanji a lot, you'll often see the hiragana "translation" right over it! Because, believe it or not, a lot of Japanese people don't know their kanji! ;) I still recommend learning it, of course, since you won't always see the hiragana with it; however, hiragana is most important!

Questions4U:
Which Japanese alphabet do you like the best?
Which alphabet is/was easiest for you to learn?
Did this method work for you, or do you think it will work?
Did you learn anything from this blog post?