I have learned all hiragana and half of katakana as for now. I have a book in which to each block of letters some words are provided. I’d say I remember one third of them and I’m wondering how important is learning words, when one still studies hiragana/katakana?
9 comments
It is like knowing the ABCs – You can learn with or without mastery of the hiragana and the katakana. Even if you are not that comfortable, do your best and try some words and see if it sticks. It will take time and practice to get used to them, might as well learn as you master them. Do not worry about having to check on the katakana multiple times – that one is rarer and I had issues with that because I never used it in the beginning.
How else are you going to put the hiragana and katakana you know to use?
Uh, if you’re learning Japanese (or any language), words might be important.
By words do you mean nouns and verbs in hiragana and katakana, or Kanji (characters that look like Chinese characters?) The latter you can pick up as you go but it shouldn’t be divorced from learning grammar and other rules of the language imho.
Since most words that are introduced alongside hiragana and katakana are simple ones, it won’t hurt to learn them along.
Most nouns, verbs and adjectives you are learning alongside learning kana will eventually be replaced with kanji one day. But memorising the words won’t hurt.
So, one day たべる or みえる will become its kanji form 食べる and 見える. So, it’ll be valuable to remember they mean “eat” and “see/look” respectively. Eventually you also will learn more readings for one kanji, but that’s a next step already. But you can also re-learn the vocab with kanji or rather, kanji will act as revision for kana as well.
Long story short: if you already learn for kana, why not learn the word as well!
Hey, you might wanna check out my profile… I a lot of people have similar questions lately and I can’t keep writing the same thing over and over lol
Some words are normally written only in kana – some can only be written in kana. You can learn those (look them up in a [dictionary](https://jisho.org/) first to see if they have a kanji based equivalent, or if they are usually written in kana).
I wouldn’t recommend learning words in kana when they are normally written with kanji. Stick with the kanji version for now (that way you’ll pick up some kanji as well).
To be honest, once you’ve learned kana, there’s no great benefit in continually practicing with just kana at the cost of moving on to kanji based vocabulary or grammar study. So move on. You can occasionally practice writing kana to keep it fresh in your mind – that should be sufficient.
If I understand your question correctly, you are asking if it is worth learning words only with kana first and then learning the version with kanji later. I think it is more beneficial to directly move on to learning words with kanji. There will still be plenty of kana around and some words are spelled with only kana anyway. IMO skip these kana-only word lists now.
Yes, learn words. This will help cement your kana. Learning words will help you read faster, you will see a word like: ひらがな and not have to slowly sound it out, youll be able to just read it as a word like you do in English/your NL. Good luck and have fun!