It’s been a week for me and I’m still tackling hiragana. I got the basic characters but dakuten and the combined characters slow me down a lot. I haven’t even started on katakana. To give an example- if I’m not fully focussed and concentrating I can mix up たand な, きand さ, おand あ.
It’s discouraging when I see Reddit posts and YouTubers say how easy it is, how we can master both in 3 hrs or a day. I even read one post that said it’s pointless to use Anki for hiragana and katakana because they are so easy. If I stick with 5 characters a day it’s easy, but once I try to do more I start forgetting. Maybe it’s my age, and I know that everyone is different. It’s just hard not to feel a bit discouraged by such comments.
I’m going to push through but just wanted to vent a bit. The bright side is that I have a headstart on kanji because I can read Chinese. I just need to learn the Japanese pronunciation and differences.
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Another example of my current difficulty with hiragana is when いfollows さ or when うfollows と. I tend to read them separately at first instinct and need to catch myself to read them as “sai” and “tou” instead of “sa-ee” and “toe-oo”.
just take your time and don’t listen to anyone criticizing you for taking time. everyone learns things at different speeds. you’ll smash it into your brain at the rate your brain permits you to smush it and no faster.
I started self-study last year at 45. I tap away at it daily and try not to treat it like a race. I mostly use Memrise and write most of the stuff just to keep it fresh as I advance. I also try to incorporate the kana and kanji into regular stuff by, say, writing my grocery list in Japanese. I still brainfart from time to time, but whatevs. I just look back and think about how much more than zero I know now.
Try to find japanese texts only in hiragana and just read them, peeking at the table whenever you forget a character. I learned it this way and think this is quite effective
Whatever your pace is, is perfectly fine. Don’t let them discourage you. You’ll get the hang of it eventually. Alphabet is always slow in the beginning because it’s so new and nothing at all like English letters.
I’m 47 and still learning. Just take it slow and easy, and enjoy yourself! Half the people on here are younger and don’t have the same life commitments of somebody who is middle age—being time poor is a thing! Another portion on here are just kind of full of BS.
My advice: you don’t always recognize your own progress. Keep a notebook. If you do that consistently then, when you look back at it in a year, you will be astonished at how far you have come, regardless of how much further there is to go.
41M here, learning for just under a year. My advice is – do as much as you want, ignore anyone else, set your own goals and find your joy where you can. I’ve been a teacher at tertiary level and coach in my career and I can tell you everyone learns at their own pace and your most formidable opponent is always your own inner monologue.
I have a suspicion that speedrunners are waaaay disproportionately represented online (youtube, this sub, other forums) and most plodders like you and I don’t usually bother to post about our progress so it’s hard to get a real sense of how long things realistically take.
But it makes sense that they’d feel like the norm if you only look at sites like this – if one spent the amount of time on Japanese that is required to ‘speedrun’ (for eg reaching wanikani level 60 in a year) one would want to talk about it too – because one would likely have little else to talk about! That’s probably 4-6 hours a day on Japanese.
I have a fulltime job and other hobbies/interests so an hour and a half per day is about all I can spare. Even then, Kanji feel like a grind most days. I have realistic expectations about fluency (IE that I will likely never achieve it). For reference, after nearly a year, the progress I’ve made on the various apps I use (Duolingo, Wanikani, Bunpo) suggest I’m at about N5 level now, though I have no reason to suspect this is the case as I have not taken any official tests.
Whatever you’re doing, it’s enough, and you’re doing great.
I think it’s worth it to keep in mind that there’s different levels of capability and a lot of the stuff you hear on reddit or YouTube or whatever won’t necessarily talk about lingering difficulties or setbacks.
I’ve been studying for 18 months now and I’ve read thousands of pages of manga and feel like I’ve “mastered” kana long ago, but compared to English? Still not close. I still need to register every character vs. in English where I can kinda glance at a full sentence and get it. Don’t get me started on different fonts and handwriting and crap, either. Reading doesn’t FEEL slow, and I can say I can read comfortably, but in reality, I still have a LOT left to improve.
My point is, everyone (deservedly) celebrates milestones, but their journey isn’t over and there’s really no point in trying to compare yourself to where they think they are. You might already be where those YouTubers think “mastery” is. Or maybe you’ll struggle here, but breeze through other things. I’d say just try to enjoy what you ARE becoming capable of, celebrate your own milestones, and recognize that what you’re still struggling with will come in time.
The Heisig books on learning hiragana and katakana (and kanji!) are FANTASTIC. His methodology/heuristics worked very well for me, at least.
The Duolingo section on hiragana and katakana are very good also. Better on the phone than using a PC (in order to reinforce the characters by drawing, using a finger instead of a mouse).
Ganbatte!
Honestly the fact that you know which ones you have mixed up and how means they’re memorized well enough.
When people talk about learning it in a day, they’re taking about the level that it sounds like you’re at. They aren’t reading at full speed, just that they don’t need to look up characters.
Now you just need recognition speed and reading “naturally”.
I think that comes with practice just learning the language. If I were you I’d just move on and practice reading as it comes up in your studies. You’ll start feeling like you’re embarrassingly slow and you just get quicker with practice without even noticing. It does take time, though.
also, yeah, I *still* sometimes confuse な for “ta,” since it has a lower case T and A right there in the character! 😀
I think it took me at least a week (probably a bit longer) to learn all the katakana in college, and then we spent about the same amount of time on the hiragana the following week. The pace was set by the teacher but I don’t think it seemed slow. (If anything, I think it was a little too fast. But I managed.)
After three semesters, I still get る and ろ mixed up. And I still can’t read hiragana very quickly (although the kanji does help, since I can instantly recognize the word or at least its meaning without trying to sound out each hiragana one at a time). I suppose maybe after reading hiragana enough you’ll just sort of be able to read it the same way I read English (i.e. reading entire words without mentally trying to string together each individual letter in order to sound it out), but so far this hasn’t happened. Guess I need more practice.
On the same boat here man…42 female here trying to learn casually with a million other things going on in life. People be like “I learn 10 new kanji a day!” And I’m like I know mountain and 1-4″ We can do this!
Be careful about attributing a phenomena that could be absolutely normal to something like age. In Kindergarten I learned the alphabet. In the first grade kids were sounding out letters. That’s after one year. You’ve been at it for a week. Frustration and confidence are also normal at any age.
Are you me
I’m 34 and started learning 2 years ago when I arrived to Japan. As people here have said multiple times, it’s not a race, take your time. Go at your own pace, don’t push too hard or you’ll get burned out.
You can do this, がんばってください!!
Anyone who says they can learn an entirely new writing system- especially one with over 40 unique characters + so many special forms and combinations- from 0 in three hours is a liar. That’s a LOT of characters! I mean, think of how long kids take to learn to read! And their brains are built for absorbing language, AND they spend tons of hours at school reading, parents practicing with them at home, surrounded by letters and word from the moment they’re born! In any language, it takes a WHILE to learn a new writing system. If you learn it in a week, congrats, you learned it faster than native speakers. If not, no worries! There’s no race
I am quite young, had started making my first attempts at approaching Japanese when I was even younger(18 y.o.), had all the same problem. In the university attended Japanese courses for beginners, lots of students had all the same problems. Most of them have made a lot of progress after two years.
I guess that age still might be a bit of disadvantage concerning ease of memorizing new things, but I highly doubt it is of much actual importance compared to numerous other factors that influence learning ability.
You’ve also mentioned that you already can read Chinese, and I am pretty sure that it will be a huge advantage when you move further at least because brain already comfortable with decomposing hieroglyphs into elements (I also suppose that on-readings of Japanese kanji should at least half of the time roughly correspond to Chinese readings, but I’ll leave that to more qualified people).
My oldest student is in his late 70s and he is making steady progress. It’s not your age. People brag about how quickly they learn hiragana but they sometimes forget that though they “covered” them all in a few weeks it probably tookonths of reading to get used to and not make virtually and mistakes.
Also, don’t consider yourself old for Japan. Currently the median age in Japan is 44 and it’s rising every year.
Keep at it! It can definitely get confusing at times, but you’ll get it eventually!
I’m 42 and am taking an extremely accelerated class here in Shinjuku — all while having a newborn and toddler at home. It’s been a humbling month to know I simply can’t study as my younger peers and grasp everything the lesson gives me. I’m struggling, but as long as I learn something new every day, I know I’m making strides.
It’s a slow burn, dude — but getting the kana under your belt will make things easier. I was able to grasp it all in less than a week through physical flashcards that I still scan through to stay fresh for pronunciation and the examples it shows on the back. I’m sure you can find something on Amazon. Go with those and I promise you you’ll getting through the kana quicker than you think. Everything with any language **takes time**. You’ll be okay. It’s crazy to know that I can look at a page of Japanese characters and [for the most part] understand it. My vocabulary is lacking, but I’ll scan through those on my phone while I’m rocking my daughter to sleep. You’ll make time.
You don’t master them in 3 hours or a day. No one’s saying that. But you can get good enough in a weekend that you can move on and start studying actual Japanese. Don’t worry about being perfect, it’s a waste of time. If you jump on something like Genki I you’ll be using hiragana so much in the first 2-3 chapters that it will have been beaten into your head and you couldn’t forget if you tried. I’m old too and not particularly smart nor was I at all good with languages when I started, and my memory is nothing special. But just going through Genki I and doing every exercise in it and the workbook had hiragana trivial by the time I was around 3 chapters in. Katakana took until I was in Chapter 5 or 6 if I remember right.
Without getting to actually studying the language quickly hiragana and katakana are just going to be meaningless scribbles that probably aren’t going to stick in your memory. That’s why when every Japanese 1 syllabus I have seen has the class start midweek and you just move on past kana by the Monday the next week. It’s very discouraging reading people saying they’re spending a month learning hiragana. You’re probably never going to learn it that way if you take it that slow.
If you mix た and な or あ and お when doing exercises out of Genki, it’s no big deal. You just correct them in your solutions after looking up the answer and then move on. You’re going to make mistakes, lots of them, we all do. I made those same kind of mistakes too when doing the first couple of chapters of Genki I. Now I make different mistakes but eventually learn from those too.
Oof, at my current age I feel like I know hiragana without having learnt it since I learned it in HS and just managed to remember it so diving back into Japanese I have only kanji, aside from the basic, left to learn. Luckily, there are so many more resources than there where even a decade or so ago!
Have you tried learning with mnemonics? I’m young, I was like at the end of 18 when I learned those, 20 now, and still learning kanji.
I learned hiragana in one YT video and katakana in another video, spent about a week on each video because I was new to the language, so even though I was young, I also went slow, once you get more comfortable you’ll probably be able to speed up a bit when you’re on kanji
And hey you said it yourself, you have a head start with kanji, think of it this way, once you’re done with kana you’ll be able to tackle something familiar and you’ll feel a lot better
One of the thingsIve learned in my short life is that practicing and drilling everything enough times will get you to remember it.
I kept getting confused between all of the similar hiragana: さ/ち、ぬ/め、ま/き/さ、etc. (Let alone katakana as well…), but I kept going at it and started learning words that helped me recognize the characters. I just kept seeing and hearing them a lot; my brain eventually figured out the differences on its own.
I’m not good at 日本語 yet, but I practice every day. (Though I’m just at 53 days yet.)