How I’ve Learned Japanese Part 2: Hiragana & Katakana

Written By: guyjin on October 23, 2009 No Comment

Last week I wrote about using “Desu” & “Masu” when you start out learning Japanese, and this created a lot of discussion about what are the best methods for learning. I stand by my methods, because I know from experience that they have worked for me. But there is certainly more than one way to learn a language, or to do anything, and its always important to tailor your learning to the methods that fit your style of learning, and that fit the purpose that you have. Not everyone learns for the same reason. For me, when I started out learning Japanese it was most important for me to be able to speak to as wide a variety of different people as possible. And this series is just about how I’ve gone about learning to do that, and gaining fluency to the point where I have been able to build my own business based on my Japanese ability.

When you start out learning Japanese, it can be a little daunting to learn that there are three different types of characters, which are all used together in written Japanese. It can be even more daunting if you allow yourself to feel overwhelmed with the thought of having to learn thousands of kanji. Personally, I didn’t begin learning kanji until I had lived in Japan for at least 6-12 months, and even then I didn’t place much emphasis on it for the first 1-2 years of my study. If you are learning at a school, or in a formal course, you will most likely be confronted with kanji much sooner than this, but it isn’t something that I believe you need to rush into, especially if your purpose is to learn conversational Japanese, as opposed to learning specifically for the purpose of reading and writing.

In my experience, hiragana is the best introduction to written Japanese, and it can be really helpful to learn your hiragana as soon as you can (even within the first few weeks of exposure to Japanese). Learning hiragana is a great way to familiarize yourself with all of the different sounds of the Japanese alphabet (there are less than in English), and is a helpful way of learning and mastering that alphabet.

There are as many ways to learn hiragana as there are people studying it. Some people write the characters over and over. Some people just use flash cards that they carry around with them. Others are able to just memorize them. Or any combination of these and other methods. For me, I used flash cards, and also wrote out lines of each character in order to memorize them.

The Japanese phonetic alphabet is of course broken up into sets of similar sounds, based on the vowels (a, i, u, e, o). The vowel order is different from English, so that takes a little bit of getting used to. But after you have nailed that, you just need to learn the consonants that are available in Japanese (k, g, s, shi, z, j, t, ch, ts, n, h, p, b, m, y, r, w), and then be able to match the vowel-consonant sets with their hiragana characters. The easiest way to do this is by taking one set at a time (eg sa, su, shi, se, so), and learning these 5 characters, before moving on to the next set. I used to take some time in the morning to write one or two lines of each character, and would then carry the flash cards around with me and quiz myself during the day. I learned one set per day, and had mastered hiragana within about a month. This was a great base for all of my future study.

In terms of learning the various consonants, and the order in which they come in the alphabet, my teacher taught me a really pathetic sentence, which was just pathetic enough that it has stuck with me for almost 20 years…

A Kid Sat There kNitting His Mother’s Yarn Really Well

I warned you it was pathetic…. Please, by all means make up your own – this one has haunted me long enough… But by making up something like this it can help you to remember the order the alphabet goes in, and by also remembering your vowel order (a, i, u, e, o), this can make learning the hiragana even easier. Its also useful when you need to look up words in a Japanese to English dictionary (do people still use dictionaries……?). I still sometimes catch myself going through the above sentence when looking up a word…

Katakana of course is the alphabet that is used for words that are borrowed into the Japanese language. Sometimes when these words are borrowed from English they can be some of the most difficult to learn to pronounce and understand when they are spoken to you… I personally place less importance on learning katakana than hiragana. I would start with hiragana, and once you have mastered that, and feel comfortable with it, I would then begin learning katakana. You can use the same methods that you have used to learn your hiragana.

Typically, within 2-6 months of starting to learn the language you should be familiar with both hiragana and katakana, but don’t worry too much about sticking to schedules. This is especially the case if you are more focused on learning to speak as opposed to writing and reading. Still, if you are living in Japan, it is useful to be able to read at least hiragana and katakana as quickly as possible, and there are no end of signs and other sources for you to practice reading just about wherever you are. Even if you don’t understand the words themselves, practice reading the kana wherever you see it, and you will master it even faster.

I haven’t even touched on kanji here. I wouldn’t even think about it for the first several months. If you are living in Japan, you will no doubt learn some of the more common kanji characters by ‘osmosis’, just because you will see some of them everywhere. But as I said above, I didn’t begin a serious study of kanji for quite some time after I began learning Japanese, because my first priority was learning the grammar and vocab. so that I could communicate as much as possible. These priorities will of course differ for everyone, but make sure that you have really mastered your hiragana and katakana before putting much time into studying kanji.

I will address my study of kanji more thoroughly in a future installment of this series. Next week I’ll talk a little more about my study of vocabulary.

If you haven’t already read it, go back and check out Part 1: “Masu” & “Desu”. You can find this series, as well as my fledgling ‘Japanese Words’ series any time in the Language section here. As always, feel free to make any comments below, and if you have any specific questions about learning Japanese ask away and I will try to address them based on my own experiences in future installments.