Japanese 101: hiragana and katakana

[karanguni]

All righty. I'm throwing together some weekly learn Japanese stuff for yhlee, and I'm posting it here for anyone who wants to play along.

This week's post is about hiragana and katakana. I'm going to focus more on drilling and just getting vocabulary out there than how to memorise the shapes and forms; there are many good resources available on Google for that.

In general, I'm going to try to convey what was useful to me as a learner and the methods I used to help brute-force my way to reading competence.

I'm going to try to keep the kid gloves off and throw in real words, with real difficulty, sooner rather than later. The faster we jump into the hot pan of reading real sentences, the faster we'll get to the kick of getting a mental reward for our efforts - without which learning is kinda hard.

Assignments

• Memorise 五十音 alphabet order
• Memorise stroke orders
• Drill hiragana and katakana 五十音 tables or worksheets; preferably twice a day with an interval (long or short) in between. Recalling is more important than writing alone.
• Drill common words list

I'll make the next post next weekend, by which time you should try to hit critical mass with recognising the characters, even if you can only sound them out.

A note

Before even kicking off drilling in hiragana and katakana, here's my personal take on learning these systems: after a certain amount of time, it's useless drilling characters on their own. In a sort of semantic satiation kind of way, writing ははははは over and over again doesn't help to distinguish it from ほほほほほ. Mindless repetition is useful, but only for certain, mechanical things.

Hiragana and Katakana

Stroke Order

The first mechanical thing worth drilling is stroke order. How you go about memorising the characters themselves is entirely up to you - there are thousands of better resources out there, and I personally think it's best to just pick one and stick with it. Drilling hiragana and katakana is boring, demoralising, and only matters when you start to see results when reading words.

I'm going to try to get as much reading of new words out as possible so that there's an effort/reward ratio, but first... Stroke order does matter. Practice it now and your kanji will benefit later. Practice it now and you'll write better in general. There was nothing more embarrassing than going up to a whiteboard and drawing a certain stroke in the wrong way. Just imagine a small Japanese professor staring at you or something.

Resource: animated stroke order

Order

The fifty sounds that comprise the Japanese alphabet are called the 五十音 (go-jyuu-on) - lit. "fifty sounds". They're ordered by consonant sound and then run through a-i-u-e-o.

a-i-u-e-o. あいうえお。 Say that a lot of times to yourself.

Then repeat あかさたな・はまやらわ until you memorise that, too, and you have the table. This is how all Japanese alphabetisations happen, and so now you're able to use a dictionary! Or browse at Kinokuniya. Hooray!

Resource: Pictoral table

Now is a good time to start mindlessly drilling in order to memorise stroke and alpha-order. (I STILL hum "a ka sa ta na" to myself the same way I hum "a b c d e f g," for what it's worth...)

Here are some printable worksheets: http://japanese-lesson.com/resources/pdf/characters/hiragana_writing_practice_sheets.pdf

I also suggest learning how to write small tsu characters. Sokuon readability is important! Aim for the lower left quadrant.

Word Drilling

Words That Are Commonly Written In Hiragana

I'm going to be real here and say that a lot of English-language education materials start off with everything in hiragana and that it is a complete and utter mess. No. It doesn't happen in real life. You will almost never read anything completely in hiragana or katakana, and if you do, you're going to have the headache of a lifetime.

So while drilling hiragana, I'm going to try to avoid "lists of useful vocabulary words," half of which you should be learning in kanji instead. Nah. Let's just learn those in the actual everyday usages in a couple of weeks.

Here are a list of words that you will almost always see in hiragana. Drill these now, because they'll form the basis of your ability to scan longer sentences soon. If you, deep in your gut, can read こと (koto) by just glossing it with your eyes, you can focus on everything else that you don't know in a sentence.

Hiragana

Nouns (meishi)
あいさつ (greeting)

"Be"/existence verbs
いる (is, living creature)
ある (is, non-living creature)

Formal nouns (形式名詞 keishiki meishi)
こと (non-material thing)
もの (material thing)
とき (time/general time)
ところ (place/general space)

Pronouns (代名詞 daimeishi)

あなた (you)
わたし (me)
この・その・どの (this, that, which)
ここ・そこ・あそこ・どこ (here, there, way over there, where)
どうして (why)

Adjectives (形容詞 keiyoushi)
おもしろい (interesting)
おかしい (strange)
かわいい (cute)
すばらしい (excellent)
うらやましい (enviable)
うれしい (happy)
つまらない (boring)

Adverbs (副詞 fukushi)
あまり
かなり
せっかく
ぜひ
だんだん
ほとんど
もし
やはり

Conjunctions (接続詞類 setsuzokushikei)
しかし (but)

Interjections (感動詞 kandouji)
N.B: Don't underestimate the value of being able to read verbal interjections that we often don't transcribe when we write in English. Japanese TV and writing with put down EEs and AAs and OOs.)
もしもし
へえ
おい

Particles (助詞 joshi)
など
ほど

Auxiliary Verbs (助動詞 doujoshi)
〜ようだ
〜そうだ

Sokuon Practice
いっぱい
いった
いらっしゃいませ


Katakana

Again, focus on useful words to you. Countries and units of measurement are good places to start.

アメリカ
フランス
ロシア
アジア

アナウンサー
ニューズ

ドル
ユーロ
メートル
リットル

Onomatopoeic words are often written in katakana, though not always:

ワンワン
ニヤニヤ

Food items are a big one:
トマト
ポテト
ミルク

Common words include

トイレ
コンセント (as in, the electrical outlet, not active consent)
メール (used where we'd normally say "text" in English)
マイク
ホテル
ペン
ケーキ
カップ

Lookalike Practice

シ・ツ versus ン・ソ versus マ・ム will mess you up. Stroke order! Stroke order!
レンジ (stovetop range)
マンション (apartments)
テーマ (theme)
クリスマス
チーム (team)
リズム (rhythm)

Sokuon Practice
ホットケーキ

Reference: http://dictionary.sanseido-publ.co.jp/dicts/encyc/allknow_conv_ja/subPage3.html

Questions!

I've written al of this a pretty long temporal way from having had to do this myself. Please comment if there's additional questions, a request for more resources (specifically about a thing, or in general about the topics), or anything else! We don't have a classroom, but we can kind of emulate one this way. Caveat: I don't speak Japanese natively; I have never been involved in language pedagogy. Corrections are hugely welcome, since I've likely made more than a few mistakes!
 

Comments

[sperrywink]

I understood very little of that, but major props! Languages are so hard for me, and something like Japanese or Chinese totally boggle me.

[karanguni]

\o/ Thank you.

[yhlee]

Sorry so late getting to this! I was getting some work stuff out of the way and then Cat.

Alternate mnemonic for "alphabetic" order that Heisig gives that worked for me is to sing "あかさた なはまや らわん" to the first bit of "Frère Jacques." It's dorky but it took! And then あいうえお I just memorized raw but fortunately it's not bad.

FORTUNATELY Heisig is really adamant about stroke order so I remember that for the hiragana. I'm just generally weak on katakana so I will try to shore that up. I am proud even to have been able to read アメリカ.

I'm going to be real here and say that a lot of English-language education materials start off with everything in hiragana and that it is a complete and utter mess. No. It doesn't happen in real life. You will almost never read anything completely in hiragana or katakana, and if you do, you're going to have the headache of a lifetime.
THIS. SO MUCH THIS. This explains why so many of the texts that I kept looking through were not actually very useful. Thank you for articulating this!

Okay! I have printed this out so I can carry it around with me easily and will be studying throughout the week. Thank you so much!

[karanguni]

If you want more stuff to drill or any other stuff, just poke!

[karanguni]

がんばってね！

カタカナは難（むずか）しいと思（おも）うなら、自分（じぶん）の名前（なまえ）を書（か）くことを練習（れんしゅう）しよう〜　リー・ユン・ハ。。。かな？

[yhlee]

どうも　ありがとう！ (Er. Not sure I'm spelling that right or if those are supposed to be kanji, I only know the sound.)

わたし の名前!!! (Yes, I copy-pasted that, but those are words I know from sound. =D)

I don't have enough grammar to figure out the whole sentence because some of those particles are ones I don't know yet, but I got some of it? :D *bounces*

BTW, this is really terrible, but Heisig's mnemonic for ユ is "as in U-boat" and despite my general disapproval of U-boats this makes it really easy for me to remember!

[karanguni]

「どうもありがとう」って、正（ただ）しい（or 正解　せいかい）です！ (I'm throwing out common kanji :))

Terminal capacity! Reading even if you don't get 100% is so valuable, I've found.

Ahaha ANY MNEMONIC THAT WORKS IS A GOOD MNEMONIC!

[chagrined]

Coming to this post late and was actually gonna ask about a song mneumonic for the syllabary order. This is a great one! I have no problem with あいうえお and I've memorized all the kana in the past (some I need to brush up on) but I always have issues remembering the right order when using my furigana dictionary. THIS SONG SHOULD BE HELPFUL!! SO THANK YOU!!

[yhlee]

No problem! The song mnemonic really works for me so if it helps others I'm glad to have shared!

Heisig notes that no one he has EVER met has ever had difficulty memorizing あいうえお after hearing it once. :D

[chagrined]

Yeah, I had Japanese lessons that never really went anywhere back when I was a young teen and the ONE THING THAT STUCK OVER THE YEARS was あいうえお lmao.

[cyphomandra]

Oooh. I followed yhlee over here - do you mind if I follow along? I have done a sort of patchwork of Japanese (class here, language exchange there, kanji drill on buses) that meant I was able to have very simple conversations on a trip to Japan, but that was over five years ago and I've been pretty slack.

I can't find it now, but when I was learning hiragana & katakana there was an on-line drill that had different fonts/styles of writing, which was very useful in getting me to focus on the important parts of a character and how it might look different but still read the same.

[karanguni]

/waves hello!

Oh, absolutely! I'm pretty sure this series is going to devolve into a sort of "learning exercises from the ground" kind of deal, so people following along and giving input on what works/doesn't is always great. :D

[gramarye1971]

I agree with pretty much all of this! I do have to say that occasionally, it's worth it to just grab a piece of scrap paper and write out the 五十音 in right-to-left vertical order, hiragana and katakana, as an off-the-cuff drill. I've done it on airplanes, while waiting for a movie to start, in a coffee shop on the back of a napkin, using it to kill time the way some people do sudoku or crosswords. I think it helps solidify the ability to write and recognise characters that really don't get used all that often, like ぬ / ヌ, and frame them in the context of characters around them. Writing the same character over and over again might not be helpful for memory and retention, but writing them all out in order (or even going out of order or mixing things up) is helpful for training the eye and the hand.

[karanguni]

Yes! Stopping at random times of the day to recall stuff is always useful, I think. It's more trying to cram everything into a single session that doesn't quite work, methinks. There's been a lot of language study about forget-and-recall being important, like flexing a muscle.

[yhlee]

I went online to look at a chart to drill katakana and came upon this, and the first time I didn't look too closely but now that I've copied it out into my bullet journal, what on earth are WI and WE doing in there? Is it for foreign sounds? Or leftover from some earlier version of Japanese? I don't remember those having hiragana equivalents...*flails*

[karanguni]

They're not foreign sounds - you're right that they're historical. Usage of we and wi - hiragana ゑ・ゐ - stopped after WWII, but is still used today for certain stylistic reasons (Ebisu beer uses the ヱ).

They may show up more in classical Japanese because of old pronunciation shenanigans, but whenever you see them just drop the W and read them as "e" or "i". The true "we" and "wi" noises are rendered in katakana by just adding the small vowel in the appropriate place: ウェ・ウィ.　

[yhlee]

That's fascinating, thank you! I am going to be haunting my mailbox until that Classical Japanese textbook arrives. :D But one thing at a time!

Oh, and in the realm of funny, a couple more Heisig mnemonics:

ネ is as in "naval disaster," because it looks like a ship running into an iceberg

For ラ we are supposed to visualize a half-bowl of ramen heaped high! Mmm, ramen. =)

(I was confused for years because the Korean for ramen is ramyeon so I kept getting it wrong in one place or the other. I think -men and -myeon are cognates? But I'm not sure.)

[karanguni]

I really want to pick up some Korean this year, so I'll be flailing at you about cognates I believe...

Between 拉面 (la mian) and ramen and ramyeon it's a tricultural sound-off...

[yhlee]

I'll do whatever I can to help! :D

Mmm, noodles. =)

[momijizukamori]

No questions, but thank you for the resources! I'm determined to actually learn more than a smattering of words in Japanese this year.