Hello there!
Over the past years I always tried to learn here and there a bit Japanese, but for several reasons I really stopped quite early without any major progress. However, this year everything is different, I am totally serious and very motivated. It is fun guys! Basically I am doing a combination between my language course I visit on a weekly basis and some self-study. But I have to admit, I suck, I am a slow learner … so I am looking for ways to improve my learning habits.
As in the post header implied: I am looking for ways to make the kana really stick and practice reading them.
I agree with people who say “Kana” is easy, you can learn them within a few hours. I was one of those people who did it and then felt like I achieved something, which is completely ridiculous. I recognise all of them, but reading a word or a sentence, I am so slow … it feels bad. What helps me is learning vocabulary with Kana only, I feel like this a good habit to make it stick. But somehow I am not happy with that, I need something else aside from vocabulary to make them stick. I feel like being able to read Kana really fluently going to be a major step forward. But how do I manage this? I need to achieve this before moving on into Kanji.
Are there any Games / Books / Mangas you would recommend? Even if I don’t know all the vocabulary, I think it would be fun doing something interesting and then like a puzzle figuring out all the words and understanding what is actually going on.
Thank you!
9 comments
Are you writing them?
> I recognise all of them, but reading a word or a sentence, I am so slow
Obviously. Remember when you learned the western alphabet initially? I don’t think you were able to read it fast at first.
The key is to keep reading and using them, and your recognition will improve.
Yeah honestly it’s just really hard to get past that mental block where you’re still taking like 0.5 seconds to process and associate each character and end up reading like that one slow kid in your 7th grade class who took 2 minutes to finish the paragraph when he got called on. You just have to keep drilling. Eventually you’ll notice you start to pick up common segments that you can instantly recognize and process all at once. Like you can probabaly read a します or whatever at the end of a sentence without having to think about it.
I find it also gets easier when you start reading kanji as kana are typically just used as grammatical supplements and prefixes/suffixes in normal writing, it’s much easier for me than trying to sightread a giant string of hiragana like a lot of beginner reading practice has you do.
I think your expectations are what’s the problem here. If you have them memorized then all there is left is usage. The problem isn’t with kana, it’s with experience and exposure. Read and write more, that’s it.
You’re about to enter the world of kanji, too, as there’s limited material that’s 100% kana out there. Also, frankly, it’s harder than with kanji interspersed, as you’ll eventually find.
So: good job, keep going, stop getting down on yourself for not being an instantly fluid reader. It takes years and isn’t even going to happen until you have a bunch of kanji under your belt, too. So you need to seriously stretch out your expectations. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
You need so much time to get decent at Japanese that focusing on kana before you do the rest is basically a waste of time.
You’ll practice them doing almost everything else. If you’re learning new words using the kanji, you’ll still need the kana pronunciation. Grammar, simple sentences, anki, etc, always kana in the lot.
Before i seriously started to learn japanese, i played “Learn Japanese To Survive! Hirgana Battle” just for fun. It served it’s purpose. I learned hiragana and learning katakana was quite simple since they follow the same pattern.
As far as i know they also made a game for katakana and beginner Kanji but i haven’t played them.
Mother 2 (Aka Earthbound) is almost entirely in Kana.
Even if you’ve already played it, it’s interesting to see the differences between the English and Japanese version.
>I feel like being able to read Kana really fluently going to be a major step forward. But how do I manage this? I need to achieve this before moving on into Kanji.
I would hard disagree with this. When I started learning, I felt the same way, and spent a lot of time drilling kana. I learned the differences between ン and ソ, between ツand シ, and how to write ぬ and め perfectly. All good stuff to know, but in reality, once you advance, you’ll recognize them in context pretty quickly.
What most people don’t learn when studying kana is the relative frequency with which they appear in the wild. For example, if you see a katakana character and wonder if it’s “n” or “so”, it’s almost always “n”. Also, in hiragana “ぬ” is used very seldom. After learning kanji for a while and looking up kanji readings, your lizard brain will recognize them. After reading native material (or even pedagogical material) and encountering a decent amount of katakana, you’ll always just gloss over ン characters, and if it’s a ソ you might notice how jarring it looks, or you might notice that the word makes no sense if you mistake it for a ン.
I’ve read about 20 novels now in native Japanese, and I think I’d have a hard time writing ぬ at this point.
TLDR: Just move on after you’ve got kana learned to about an 80%+ success rate. Things will iron themselves out in the long run through usage in context.
Just read a lot. There’s free graded reading material [here](https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/) and [here](https://yomujp.com/n5l/). You could also go to animelon, turn on the hiragana subtitles only, turn the speed down to your reading speed, and try to read along with the words. Probably not as effective as just plain reading, but it’s nice for variety.
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>I need to achieve this before moving on into Kanji.
Why?