I started learning Japanese through Wanikani and completed that, and it really helped me reading most things written with kanji (living in Japan right now).
However, I’m preparing for N2 and failed miserably on hiragana-only questions, e.g. finding kanji for that hiragana, finding synonym of a hiragana word, onomatopoeia.
I feel that kanji gives me the idea what the word means from the looks alone. But hiragana doesn’t.
Anyone has any tips on this? Or is there any apps dedicated for that? *Couldn’t find anki set for this, and I only know few hiragana-only words so far to be able to make complete anki set myself.
I wish there’s a set of 1000 most common hiragana-only words or some sort…
5 comments
“Finding kanji for that hiragana”
It sounds you, like I used to, use kanji as a mnemonic to know what the word means…. There are a couple of ways around this I think
1- listen without subs. I know you said you live in Japan but there are only so many words you will hear on the daily..If you actively listen to either podcasts or more specifically shows, you will begin to rely less in kanji and more on just how the words sounds…when I didn’t do that much listening, Kanji are basically how I got around reading stuff. I would struggle if there was a word without any kanji…but once I started heavy listening and there was no kanji for me to associate the words, I really had to know it based on context
2- use anki but instead of writing the word in its kanji form, the front side should be the pronunciation in hiragana and the back should be how it’s written with kanji and its definition
adverbs and onomatopoeia are probably the bane of all learners’ existence. I struggle with them too! I don’t have any better advice than to force yourself to use and memorize them one at a time until they stick… but I do share your pain with remembering all of them.
Seriously though, half the time I just make up onomatopoeia sounds and it seems like the person I’m speaking to understands xD
I always try to remind people to think about Japanese like it were another language without kanji. If you had to learn French, or Spanish, or Russian, or any other language without kanji, would you feel the same way about learning new words? Would you be asking for emoji to go with the words you learn to more easily remember them?
Kanji are just like that. You should be able to learn and remember the word meanings by the sound they make, not just by relying on kanji. Kanji do help remind us the meaning and a lot of kanji-heavy vocab (mostly chinese-origin compounds) do rely on kanji to remember the reading too, but a lot of words in Japanese don’t.
If you can remember that manger in French means “to eat”, surely you can remember that たべる in Japanese means “to eat” without having to see the kanji 食 in it.
For words like onomatopoeias however, it’s an entirely different beast because they are actually among the hardest to properly internalise as a learner and there’s no really easy way around that, you will eventually learn them as you become more advanced in the language but for now it’s going to be a bit of a pain unfortunately.
How well are you scoring on the listening section of the test lol?
I also found these challenging, and while I consider myself professionally fluent now, this is a part of the language that I still struggle with more than others. I’ll share what I did when studying them anyway.
When learning a new word:
I look up the word in a Japanese <-> Japanese dictionary and read the example sentences out loud. Unlike kanji words that I prefer to write to memorize, I find these “hiragana” ones are important to vocalize, and including context is good.
When reviewing with Anki:
If I am familiar with the word and have a good sense for it, I think of a sentence and say it out loud using the word. If I am unfamiliar, I look it up again and then come up with my own sentence and vocalize it.
It is time consuming, but I felt that the time consistently paid off for me.