I’m new to learning japanese and so far i’ve learned the first 3 rows of Hirigana in 2 days, but it’s extremely hard to retain 15 characters. I was wondering if the pace im going at is fine so I wanted to how long it’s taken others to finish the Hiragana chart?
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Are you using Anki by any chance? Anki will brute force Hiragana and Katakana in your brain! Seriously though… use Anki lol
I prefer https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ the memory tricks make it so easy. It took me about a week. Retention was great!
Retention took another month or so for me. (Both hiragana and katakana) I learnt them in like a month. But that’s because I’m used to learning different scripts since childhood. I found it easier because of that.
You should be able to read and write all the kana (hiragana & katakana) within 2 weeks – at a comfortable pace. See [https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Ive been learning for a year and have 300+ kanji burned on wanikani and im still struggling to read katakana
1 day for unique hiragana characters and about 1 week to be able distinguish between れねわ.
I studied Japanese as a major and on writing classes it was 2 weeks for hiragana, 2 weeks for katakana (the curriculum was made for people starting completely from scratch)
I’m not lying when I said it took me a weekend to learn all the hiragana, but it took me a week to be able to 100% instantly recall them, be able to write them and read them without confusion.
You will get plenty of practice reading kana from learning vocabulary, so there is no need to become a kana expert right away. Just spend a few days to push all of them into short term memory and then immediately start with any vocabulary deck.
Fun fact: I first started hiragana back in 2011, but I gave up because I thought it was too hard. I only picked it up back during quarantine last year when I made up my mind to seriously learn Japanese. So technically, I guess ten years 🙂
I managed to retain hiragana fairly quickly (katakana took longer, kanji still working on lol).
I found it helped to write stuff in hiragana– doesn’t necessarily have to be like proper words, just combinations of hiragana that you remember. It may also help to write your own hiragana chart, both for remembering the hiragana as well as develop your own handwriting style. It may take a while for the hiragana to click, but it will eventually.
And if the pace works for you, then it’s fine! This is a journey, not a race 😀
Took about a week to learn Hirigana and Katakana using Duolingo. It’s not a great system for learning vocabulary and grammar but the kana exercises worked great for me. Hirigana is pretty easy to retain once you have a basic grasp on it, you see all the characters so often that reading them becomes second nature. Katakana is a bit trickier as it’s used less often and some of the characters rarely come up.
It took me 2 days to learn all hiragana. I wrote a lot and read short stories written in hiragana. Later I did same with katakana
First week of Japanese class in college, was told I needed to learn the characters by the next class. So I wrote all of them onto index cards, and just kept going through them over and over to learn them in a night.
Of course actually retaining the knowledge took me around a week or two, to where I was comfortable reading it.
2 weeks to fully hammer it in, but katakana took longer. Don’t worry too much if you don’t 100% grasp it, you’ll get the hang of it more as you learn kanji and stuff, just make sure you don’t use romaji when dealing with Japanese, it’s a trap.
Does it really matter how long it took for some other people? You have your pace. Especially with this limited set of characters, kanji is a completely different beast
I’m perhaps a bit of an outlier, used Remembering the Kana and had it all done after 2 hours (unfortunately wasn’t this successful with kanji, with kanji I’m probably below mediocre pace)
About a week
I think for this its just repetition, and also doing drills on reading to practice what you learned. If you have an iPhone I highly recommend the app Benkyō. Its like flash cards that are pre made, you can learn hiragana, katakana, kanji, and vocab I love it I use it for vocab! It also has audio so you can pronounce it outloud with the app while going over the cards.
For YouTube drills I highly recommend https://youtu.be/eTNZvn2OVRg these drills. They’re super simple especially if you’re just starting out! For the alphabet i recommend just tons of repetition over and over and after doing drills, and maybe even writing drills if you want to write!
All in all if youre consistent in a couple days you should be good! It took me 2-3 days with just constant repetition. And you dont have to worry about forgetting since once you start studying vocab, grammar etc youll constantly see these characters 🙂
A week and a half
3 hours or something, not long
I used tofugu and that drag and drop game thing
It took me about a month to learn Hirgana, and another month for Katakana. But don’t be discouraged by that. I just learn at a very slow pace (despite putting in roughly 30 min to 2 hours a day).
If you’re having trouble retaining try switching up what you’re doing. You might find that using other resources like the Write It! Japanese app on your phone, the duolingo web app, or the [Tofugu Kana Quiz](https://kana-quiz.tofugu.com/) might help you retain better. Or, you could drill them into your head by writing them down several times.
I think something like 2 weeks. They often suggest to learn to write them as well and I agree, it is very useful since it fixes it in your brain. And the only way to memorize them really well is, as always, repetition repetition and repetition… i used to learn a row each 2-3 days and review the old ones
About a day to memorize them but it takes a bit of drills, exercises, reading, etc. over time until I was able to remember them at a decent pace.
A weekend I think. But I also used most of the two days. Katakana on the other hand… I still can’t differentiate between ソ and ン haha😅 but I never committed that much to learn it
Maybe a week or two?
honestly duolingo is really helpful once youre slightly familiar with the characters. i wouldn’t start with it but it’s also a really great way for me to practice and make sure i’m remember every character the right way
It didn’t take me long to relearn the Hiragana. It was relearning the Katakana that would take me longer, but in the end it was worth it. Now I can read Katakana almost as well as Hiragana.
Instead of using flashcards (and after relying less on mnemonics), I used this website to constantly test myself until I learned the alphabet 100%. It helped me, it will help you too:
[https://drlingua.com/japanese/games/kana-bento/](https://drlingua.com/japanese/games/kana-bento/)
The key to mastering the Kana Bento is to keep practicing the alphabet until you get the alphabets right 100% several times. Once you get the alphabet right in under a minute in multiple sessions, at that point, you’ve almost burned the alphabet in your head and practicing reading it in various places will be straightforward.
I started last August. I’m still working on it. I can read it and sound it pretty fast. Yet, I won’t consider myself fully learned until I no longer have to think about it.
Right now, I’m really focusing on Katakana since I rarely use it. I use this free tool and found it useful for both Hiragana and Katakana.
https://realkana.com/
Also, I know Duolingo is a bad word around these parts but it has really nice tools for both Hiragana and Katakana.
I had a student that took about 14 weeks to learn it (studying Japanese twice a week for a half-hour at a time, ^(Note: that half an hour was not spent on just learning the characters, they spent it learning vocab and grammar. Like they would learn the word and the characters of ふしぎ)).
I think most people can force themselves to memorize Hiragana in like a day(cram it), then quiz themselves for a couple of days afterward, then just start learning grammar and vocab. **But if you learned 1 character a day, you’d be done in like 2 months, so as long as you learn it before 2 months are up, your doing great.**
I think self-learning can be really hard at the beginning, too easy to whimp out haha. I had like 3 years where I tried to learn hiragana and just couldn’t do it(I had a major romaji crutch), then I took an actual class and learned them all within the week.
About a day and a half of looking at a chart and scribbling on a piece of paper. I’m not saying I had perfect recall at that point, but I knew them well enough and after that it was just a matter of reinforcing them.