LLearn Japanese

Help?! Hiragana struggles

Hi all, okay so I’m teaching myself Japanese through the app duolingo. English is my first language, and I’m relatively good at French, some Spanish, Italian and German. I’m finding as I working through the hiragana lessons that obviously I have it off or something. I’ve been telling my 17 year old son (who is going through some of the same lessons) that I’ve memorized some of the sounds but the characters mostly look the same to me. During a moment of frustration, I expressed that I find it odd that the word “red” in Japanese and the letter “a” in Japanese are pretty much true same thing. I’m thinking I must be going about this all the wrong way because none of it makes sense??? I’m zooming right through duolingo lessons but the farther I get the more confusing it is because the characters all stay the same but now they all mean new words. Help?

4 comments

  1. > I expressed that I find it odd that the word “red” in Japanese and the letter “a” in Japanese are pretty much true same thing.

    I’m not sure where you got this.

    The sound ”a” in hiragana is just あ.

    The word for red is 赤 in kanji, or あか (“aka“) in hiragana. That’s composed of two sounds, あ (“a“) + か (“ka”).

    Does this make sense? If not, can you be more specific about which part you are finding tricky?

    You might just need to practice your hiragana more before trying to learn more words.

  2. My son also told me that the kanji (??) doesn’t represent alphabet but more like syllables but then I keep finding words that are just one kanji so I’m thinking that is off too?? Most languages I speed through because there is a similarities between them, but right now I’m going off what I learned when I was in my twenties (just learn the word don’t worry about the characters) to now which is learn the characters. I’d give an exact example but so far I’ve come across so many I don’t know where to start

  3. IDK why あ would look like red 赤 unless you aren’t used to looking at characters yet, which now that I say it, is probably very likely.

    But anyway IDK anything about duolingo, but you can learn hiragana in a few hours.

    read this:

    https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

    Play this simple game for a few minutes afterwards

    https://drlingua.com/japanese/games/kana-bento/

    and practice writing the chart once in a while over the next few days, and you’ll have it down

  4. Haha yeah I’m on tofugu.com right now and it’s confusing me even more. Lol I don’t get how it is focusing on sounds but I thought all these were words??

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