I’m currently learning japanese through duolingo for nearly 60 day, but i still have trouble with hiragana and katagana. i think if i get the hang of those two i can really start to learn the language
Sadly duolingo dosen’t let you redo Some of the lessons on hira and kata soo i wonder if there is a better way to learn?
15 comments
I wrote [Ringotan](https://www.ringotan.com) to help learn kanji, but it works equally well with hiragana/katakana. Try it out!
The advantage of this over pen+paper is that it’s able to use SRS to set different intervals for each character, based on how well you know each one. Also it’s able to give you hints when you mess up. And it’s easier to do while pooping.
this guide
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
then play this game
https://drlingua.com/japanese/games/kana-bento/
Force yourself to read it (manga, news articles, games) even if you don’t know what it’s saying. It was incredibly frustrating for me at first but by the time I read through an entire two manga volumes I was doing loads better
YouTube Japanesepod101 hiragana 1 hour. Then do Japanesepod101 katakana 1 hour.
realkana.com is a great site for drilling
If you have a phone, get a drill app like Kana or Kana Drill, or Ringotan
There’s also a fun app called FlicKuma! which is a little game to get used to using the Japanese flick keyboard. But because you need to be able to read kana to get a good score, I found that it really helped my reading ability. Unironically I think this was the best thing for my kana reading out of anything I did.
I personally like [DJTguide](https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/) You can select which five character you’d like to work on before adding them to the ones you already know. I found it took me about two weeks to learn them all this way.
I had success with Obenkyo on android and Memrise on pc. But they have an app as well
I learned back in the day when there were no apps.
Pen, paper, and a simple vocab list for practice.
The thing that really helped me remember hiragana and katakana was Renshuu (you can find the website [here](https://www.renshuu.org/), but I believe there’s also a mobile app if that’s more your style). Going over the levels in the Quick Draw game was what really got the characters to start sticking in my head.
I think ultimately it doesn’t matter much what the “best” way is since kana represent a small time investment compared to most other things in the language, and they get reinforced by basically anything japanese-related. That said, my guess is a combination of (1) mnemonics, like the tofugu ones over at [https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/) , (2) between 3 and 15 hours of rote practice on a website like [https://realkana.com/](https://realkana.com/) (You can mark all katakana and hiragana at the same time, and you can make it use multiple fonts at random), (3) writing each one down between 2 and 20 times one time
After all that, you should have most of them down. Ask around or google for help with the ones that give you trouble because they look “similar” (Sometimes the stroke order helps get a good “feel” for it). Over time you might forget some if you’re studying very sporadically or not a lot every day, but you can always just do some extra quiz practice on realkana.
Do you have romaji enabled on duolingo? If so, I’d highly suggest you disable it, to naturally increase your kana practice.
I used [this](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jernung.writeit.jpn&hl=en_US&pcampaignid=APPU_1_0lUvZK7SGqusxc8Pq_ikCA) app to practise writing kana. It might help you too. Also, i would suggest you to turn off the romaji translations in duolingo if you haven’t yet. You will get fluent much faster that way.
I agree with what others have said about Tofugu. However, when I was learning, I didn’t know Tofugu existed, so I learned through reading. There is an app called Unuhi. They have Japanese children’s stories for like… $1 each that are in Hiragana only. They were really helpful for me back then.
I learned hiragana pretty well in about a week using a free app called hiragana Sensei. About 20 minutes before bed and using it in short bursts a few times throughout the day was all it took.
I just used Kana Dojo on android. It lets you test any number of groups of kana together, so it’s easy to focus on a new category on its own each day and then test it alongside everything else you learned. Looks like RealKana is a very similar website and iOS app.
Ideally you’ll want to be able to write them too, but meh. You’ll learn how to write them quick if you ever do any composition practice or hand write your grammar points and whatnot, I honestly don’t think it’s a big deal if you skip writing them this early on.
As soon as you think you have hiragana and katakana mostly down using one of the above apps (or some other method), it’ll be trivial to retain them since they’ll show up in furigana, kana words, and loan words absolutely everywhere. Learning kana shouldn’t take very long and it gets reinforced constantly. Don’t worry about using SRS for kana, that’s way overkill lol.
I used the app Kana to learn it with spaces repetitions. Did it maybe 15-30 minutes a day and it took a couple of months before it really stuck but it was super effective. You can probably learn it faster if your memory is better than mine