I recently started trying to learn some Japanese, it’s early days but I was happy with the progress I was making. I’ve learned all the ‘standard’ Hiragana characters, but have been really struggling with the special characters (がぎ… ぱぴ… etc).
Basically I just can’t get which characters are modified to make which sounds to stick in my head. Like if I wanted to make a ‘Ga’ sound, I would struggle to remember that you modified か (Ka) and not, for example, た (Ta). Right now the only way I can do it is to spend a minute or so going through character by character, remembering them phonetically in order. So if I wanted to know that I needed to modify は (Ha) to get ば (Ba), I have to go through remembering が (Ga) ぎ (Gi) ぐ (Gu)… ざ (Za) じ (Ji) ず (Zu)… and so on all the way until I reach ば.
Maybe I’d get it eventually if I keep brute forcing it like this, but I’ve been doing it that way for over a week and today when I tried not doing this (to see if I’ve made progress in actually remembering them) I was no better than I was when I started. Does anyone have any advice?