I’ve been learning Japanese through Duolingo for just over three weeks now. I’ve already had to “learn” the base hiragana symbols in order to proceed. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to practice them without introducing more and more characters including katakana and recently kanji, and I became overwhelmed.
I started using Anki as a way of practicing the base set before moving on to include any others, unfortunately though, it doesn’t seem to be working for me as I can’t seem to find any connection between the syllables and their characters.
I believe if I understood the reason behind why each syllable is assigned it’s character it would help greatly but I can’t seem to find a system. For example nu ぬ and me め share much of the same strokes, but don’t share any letters or a similar pronunciation. Same with wa わ and ne ね.
As is often the case, I’m probably missing something. If I am I’d be so greatful if someone could point it out for me.
Thanks.
11 comments
Highly recommend this mnemonic guide for learning hiragana and katakana https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
You’re overthinking it. Just learn the characters and their respective sounds.
[Here’s a site](https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/) for practicing hiragana & katakana. [Here’s](https://realkana.com/) another one.
Write out the kana and drill them until you know them. There’s no point looking for any deep connections. Learning Hiragana & katakana is the first step in learning Japanese, and probably the easiest.
Some more [advice & resources here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
Hiragana and Katakana are both syllabarries, the relationship between the shapes and pronunciations of their syllabograms are more or else just as arbitrary as those of the Latin letters that you are writing in.
The shapes of Hiragana and Katakana are more or less descended from the Kanji used in the Man’yōgana writing system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27yōgana#Development
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#History
Kanji are Phono-Semantic Logo-Syllabograms, and if you look at the Chinese Languages, Korean, or even Vietnamese, you would see that a majority of the Characters have a semantic component that tells you the meaning along with a phonetic component that provides a clue to the pronunciation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Phono-semantic_compounds
However, Japanese has deviated a lot over the millennia as it developed into its modern form, and this no longer holds as true for it on a consistent basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings
There isn’t really a shortcut, you’ll want to learn vocabulary in context with good resources and it will eventually come to you.
>I’m probably missing something
No; there’s no reliable link between shape and pronunciation.
<you surely don’t expect ‘o’ to sound a little like ‘c’>
I made flashcards – a tiny deck of hiragana/katakana 2cm x 3cm cards with their romaji on the reverse. When in an idle moment, I’d pull them out, randomly shuffle and pronounce them: flip, confirm, repeat.
There’s not a direct connection between their shape and their sound. It’s like asking why d and b look similar, or why c and k look different even though they make the same sound. It’s just how the letters look.
All Japanese writing, kana and kanji, are tests of your brute force memorization. There is no official “reason” why any character is read the way it is.
Hiragana are simplified versions of Kanji, so trying to learn them based on their origin might not help because you’d be trying to learn a more complicated symbol to learn a simpler one.
What I would recommend for those that look similar is to find strong associations with words and concepts that use them and revert to those when you have trouble differentiating them.
For example, with わ, ね, and れ. You can relate わ to the word わからない, which means “I don’t understand”. You can also relate it to は, which is pronounced “ha” normally, but you’ll encounter it most of the time as a particle, in which case it is pronounced “wa”. So the confusion that は and わ creates can make it easy to remember わ.
ね (ne) becomes easy to remember when you realize it can be used as a grammar point to express something similar to asking “isn’t it?” at the end of a sentence. So you can say:
あつい （暑い -> it’s hot.
あついね （暑いね）-> it’s hot, isn’t it?
So, seeing and hearing ね at the end of sentences will make it easy to remember by simple repetition.
That just leaves れ, which you can associate with it’s own word or just remember by elimination (it’s not わ or ね). Try to find a word that uses it in an important, easy to remember way. For example, だれ（誰）, means “who” in questions, and you’ll hear it all the time.
ぬ can be related to いぬ （犬）which means “dog” and め（目）means eye. If you need a stronger word for め can use めがね（眼鏡）which means “glasses”, for example.
You don’t need to use these exact examples. It’s better if you make up your own that are easy to remember. Also, you don’t need to learn the kanji I’ve added yet, it’s there if you need it as reference later on.
No direct connections but for the two pairs you mentioned, I remember using eyes to remember め since it’s the same kanji reading and looks like an eye with fancy makeup. わ with an open mouth (ending stroke ),ね and れ with how the tongue feels like it’s positioned.
Duolingo lessons for hiragana and katakana are trash.
Put down Duolingo completely for now. Follow these two guides:
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/
Finish one before starting the other.
Then go back to duolingo
So you’re saying that you get confused because ぬ& め, and わ & ね look similar but don’t sound similar? The same is true for a lot of letters in the English alphabet e.g. I&L, C&O, O&Q, d&b, v&w etc. The shapes are totally arbitrary.
You just have to memorise them. I found it very helpful to actually write them out while saying the sound outloud. And using them to practice writing simple words like ありがとう、 こんにちは、 いちご etc
There’s a page in duolingo that allows you to learn the characters. Much better than just using the normal path