Karuta card game – good practice for learners?

6 comments

1. There are DOZENS of types of karuta. The poem version uses poems from (I believe) the Heian period. You read the first line of a famous poem and you snatch up the poet (I think).

   But I’ve seen them for hiragana and each character corresponds to a particular something. For example someone reads a clue card which starts with あ, and everyone looks for the あ card. Usually the things on the card everyone is looking for starts withあ as well.

2. There are karuta apps such as 競技かるた if you want to try it out and see if it’s helpful for you! As with any language, learning from poems might not be useful for everyday speech, but it might be good for vocab and Kanji recognition. There are also karuta for kids that use hiragana which might also be useful. Good luck with your Japanese studies! （╹◡╹）

3. I often do karuta with my students after we’ve learned some hiragana. It’s a good “brain break” game if you have people to play it with. Usually you need at least 3 people, one reader and two players. You could also probably set up something like a quizlet deck with the Japanese audio set up to randomize reading out the cards for you if you want to play solo.

4. The cards that are used for competitive play are not that useful, the poems are too old to be easily understandable and the cards you play with only contain the second half in kana. (You’re also not really supposed to read them when playing, you only use the first few distinguishing mora).

   It’s not just the language of the poems that is difficult, you also need a lot of background knowledge to make sense of them since they’re so short and were written according to the conventions of a foreign culture 1000 years ago. A lot of it will just look like strings of random kana depending on how much classical Japanese and Japanese history you know.

   Since children learn these poems in school there are manga etc that explain them, so if you’re interested in the actual poems, one of those might be nice. But don’t expect it to be easy.

   There also are variants of the game that use other poems. I don’t know if there are any that are good for studying Japanese though. I think it’s a problem that you’re really meant to have all the poems in memory, which is difficult and not very useful and a bit of a conflict too since you probably want to put that effort into learning the actual language first.

5. If you are referring to 競技かるた, since that is most of what that video is, as someone who has been playing for awhile, the language of the poems is not going to help you as it is classical Japanese. Though they vary in their ease of understanding, some like ゆら* I think are pretty easy to understand, but others are more head-scratching. I probably learned more Japanese from the mnemonics to remember the poems than I did the actual poems. I learned such useful words as 積み木.

   As someone down below said, you aren’t reading the poems though, you have them all memorized and then the locations memorized.

   However, I will say intentional listening did help my Japanese listening somewhat. It’s certainly hard to quantify, but I know it made me better. In other words, if you’re not actually interested in playing competitively, it’s going to do little for you.

   *由良の門(と)を渡る船人かぢをたえ、ゆくへも知らぬ恋の道かな

6. yes but it’s not super beginner friendly

   or you can just watch or read chihayafuru, tho that’s probably how you found out about it in the first place, i’m guessing 😉