Nine years ago I did a year abroad at 秋田国際教養大学 and we had an assignment to just do something creative with Japanese. One of my classmates made a secret handshake thing to help memorize the “troublesome” katakana.
The handshake is tied to this phrase: *Yo! Sushi, son.*
Which is ヨ、スシ、ソン… but for the purposes of the “handshake”, ス is considered to be ツ.
That gives you ヨ、ツシ、ソン
Now pretend that these are graphical representations of your right hand:
* ヨ — your middle three fingers are pointing to the left
* ツ — your index and middle finger are pointing up
* シ — your index and middle finger are pointing left
* ソ — your index finger is pointing up
* ン — your index finger is pointing left
The point of starting with ヨ is just to make sure you don’t mix up the left/up sequence of the “handshake”
So if you’re ever in doubt, you can just quickly do the *yo! sushi, son*. handshake thing, count how many fingers are pointing which way, and there you go. You’ll never confused ツ and シ again. (But you might get some sort of weird looks in public.)
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6 comments
I never had many problems with them, tho I understand why many people confuse those
What I do have problems with and surprisingly didn’t saw many complain about are フ ウ ラ ワ, they’re absolutely impssible
I’ve been learning Japanese now for a month and I have learned Katakana, Hiragana and some Kanji. Despite the difficulty of Kanji, the hardest thing for me to remember is ツ and シ. This may be a silly way to remember but it’s surely helped me out. ありがとう😊
in my case:
ヨ ー **Yo**, that E is flipped!
シ ー Eyes are at the **s**ide.
ツ ー Eyes are at the **t**op.
ン is flatter than ソ
Always funny to see what people come up with 🙂
This is a fun little mnemonic device! Gonna save this, as I have problems with most of these same characters.
Interesting. I usually remember it by thinking that if the smaller strokes are at the top, the character comes earlier in its respective series and if they’re at the bottom, it comes later.
* So, シ has them at the top and is 2nd (out of サ シ ス セ ソ)
* ツ has them at the bottom and is 3rd
* ン has the stroke at the top and is the 1st and only character in its set
* ソ has the stroke at the bottom and comes 5th
So, assuming the [**a-i-u-e-o**] sequence remains the same, this helps me tell them apart.