I learned hiragana and katakana by drilling RealKana [0], together with the Flash-based Drag-n-Drops [1] back when Flash was still a thing. It looks like the original author of [1] has non-Flash versions now [2].
RealKana is great for drilling recognition (kana -> pronunciation), and I learned the individual kana by loading one column at a time (e.g. ka/ki/ku/ke/ko). Drag-n-Drop is good for speed-testing recognition, but also for recall (pronunciation -> kana), since it's invertible: you can either choose a pronunciation and go find its kana, or choose a kana and find which pronunciation it goes to.
I'm not sure you can really "learn" these characters without drilling like this -- the symbols are arbitrary, so you have to memorize the association between glyph and reading by brute force.
Hiragana and katakana are just the very easy parts of written Japanese - it's merely like learning Greek or Cyrillic alphabets.
Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard.
However, unlike western writing systems, there's also a third thing which is not an alphabet: Kanji. And this is a world of troubles, because Kanji is literally FUBAR. So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then. Korea used to use Chinese characters too, they eventually (mostly) dropped them in favor of something simpler.
> So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then.
They did consider it in the 20th century when Japan was modernizing and catching up with the Western world. Nowadays nobody takes you seriously if you propose abolishing it. The debate was settled in 1962-1966 [1] when the government officially gave up any attempt to remove kanji from the Japanese writing system. It’s a very much a fringe idea now.
[1]: See 国語国字問題 on Japanese Wikipedia. The full quote is 漢字仮名交じり文が審議の前提。漢字全廃は考えられない。
How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries.
Japanese words are lengthy compared to English as well. Kanji packs more content into less space.
I agree that the existence of “rare kanji” is a bit strange, but 8,000 or so characters seems reasonable, especially with so many compound kanji.
Dropping kanji will probably make the language even harder, due to the huge amount of homophones. It won’t be impossible because clearly Japanese people can talk with each other despite the homophones (pitch accent might help a bit here, but I doubt it would be easier than just learning kanji.
> Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard
The first time I visited Japan I set my phone wallpaper to a Katakana chart image and whenever I was waiting around (riding a train/subway, etc) I'd sit and read words on advertising. By the end of the week I no longer needed the chart.
This was back when data was extremely expensive and pocket wifis weren't a thing yet so there were far fewer distractions, I guess that helped...
I'll give a couple of these a shot, but I also really have to recommend the spaced repetition Anki provides for drills. There are a lot of community created decks [0] for different aspects of Japanese. And for some reason, creating your own deck for topics or vocabulary really seems to help with memorization.
I can say that after just over three weeks I'm sounding out words. I think hours practiced are a better measure than weeks, but I don't know how many hours I've spent. (Even then sleep seems vital to processing the material, so you can't probably can't just count straight hours you've spent cramming.)
My study has involved using this deck [1]; writing out the hiragana and katakana charts several times; and using Tofugu [2][3] or YouTube for mnemonics, extra explanation, or stroke order.
For anybody that stumbles on this, I'll note the Anki deck I'm using didn't have audio for the hiragana and katakana combination character cards. Audio is extremely useful for these, so I generated it using the Hyper TTS Add-On[0].
Yes -- the dakuten and handakuten marks are very systematic modifiers of the readings of the underlying glyphs. The dakuten more or less voices the leading syllable (ka -> ga, ta -> da), and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. From my perspective, you only really need to learn the base kana and remember the rule for the modifying marks -- you're not learning entire new kana after that.
(There's also combinations like kyu = ki + small-yu, but that also just builds on the kana you already know, and behaves pretty logically.)
> Hiragana being far more useful to know starting out, if you had to pick one.
Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.
> I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.
This is what many people don't realize when they wish they wouldn't have to learn Kanji or Hanzi. They make a lot of sense for languages with lots of homophones.
I can only tell you why I upvoted it: It looks like a useful learning tool, as different sense experiences are associated with each other. I don't find it poorly built, and I don't know enough Japanese to know what's incomplete.
Agreed - but probably the tight coupling between the hiragana, the romanji and the audio may give people a bit of a casual revelation about Japanese symbols.
(They are not all anki, wanikani, flavor of the month SRS spammers like some of us)
As an N4 student of Japanese the origin story of Hiragana listed here was quite interesting. However the overall layout/design of the characters and page leaves much to be desired.
So many of these sites exist. I even made one as a hobby project for learning React. Mine is a bit more involved (learn mode with mnemonics, quiz mode with a timer and different fonts, character filtering and modified characters). Thinking about expanding on it if anyone would like to suggest ideas or fork it. I mostly made it to force me to learn Katakana and Hiragana.
I know absolutely no Japanese letters. And FWIW, I also know absolutely no Chinese/Mandarin (btw are they the same?), Korean etc.
I speak two languages — English and another language you probably haven't heard of that does not use English-looking letters (such as "a", "b" etc).
Anyway, provided I'm told that a given text is Japanese, I can tell if a letter is Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana.
Which I think is commendable — if I may say so myself — given I didn't even know about the existence of "Kanji", "Katakana", or "Hiragana" until 3 years ago.
Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese. So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese). There's also traditional vs simplified Chinese, technically; they're similar with some differences in how they're written. Japanese also has some differences which can be confusing because a lot of application developers just use the Chinese character sets for kanji: https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/
One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. Including the text makes it more accessible to a wider audience regardless of what "dialect" is spoken in the show.
> So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese).
This isn't really true; there are characters that are exclusive to one or the other, like 冇. The stronger political position of Mandarin means that its idiosyncratic characters are viewed as "real" while the idiosyncratic characters required by other languages aren't, but it's a fundamentally symmetric situation.
> One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another.
The written versions of the language are also that different. The subtitles are in Mandarin, which everyone must learn to read.
(How common are hard-coded subtitles in modern Chinese media? They're on the older stuff, but it seems like a lot of modern shows don't bother.)
> I also know absolutely no Chinese/Mandarin (btw are they the same?)
If you see a bare reference to "Chinese", it will be referring to Mandarin.
There are several families of Chinese languages, with the most prominent being:
- 官话 (literally "mandarin speech"; Mandarin belongs to this family)
- 粤语 ("Yue language"; Cantonese belongs to this one)
- 吴语 ("Wu language"; Shanghainese belongs here)
- 闽南语 ("Southern Min language"; Hokkien belongs here)
It's also possible (and routine) to just label a variety of speech with the name of the place where it is spoken. This gives the names of specific dialects rather than broad families:
- 普通话 ("ordinary speech", this is Mandarin. It is conceived of as being an artificial standard rather than being specifically associated with any particular place.)
- 广东话 ("Cantonese", the speech of 广东, which is a large province)
- 上海话 ("Shanghainese", the speech of 上海, which while admittedly a large city is not as large as a province)
- 福建话 ("Hokkien", the speech of 福建, also a large province)
- 北京话 ("Beijingnese", again just a city. This construction applies at pretty much every scope.)
普通话 is the official name of Mandarin, but there are some important synonyms:
- 汉语 ("Han language" - Han is the ethnic term for the Chinese people. As noted, synonymous with Mandarin.)
- 中文 ("Chinese" - here the term is taken from the name of China, 中国. Also synonymous with Mandarin.)
There are some lookalikes, though. 夕べ is easily confused for katakana タベ (tabe), but is actually kanji 夕 (yuu) + hiragana べ (be). Hence it is more commonly written 昨夜 using kanji only.
In practice though, you'll never confuse them because katakanas are only used for non-Japanese words. 昨夜 sounds a bit too formal if you're chatting with friends.
Layout breaks for "ko" (and some other sounds) on desktop browser. I was thinking of building similar tool, but using hover and probably doing some smart-ish preloading thing, or adding all sounds to one huge audio file and seeking them, to make it easier to be cached and work offline. A quick switch to Katakana shouldn't be hard to implement too.
Readit News
RealKana is great for drilling recognition (kana -> pronunciation), and I learned the individual kana by loading one column at a time (e.g. ka/ki/ku/ke/ko). Drag-n-Drop is good for speed-testing recognition, but also for recall (pronunciation -> kana), since it's invertible: you can either choose a pronunciation and go find its kana, or choose a kana and find which pronunciation it goes to.
I'm not sure you can really "learn" these characters without drilling like this -- the symbols are arbitrary, so you have to memorize the association between glyph and reading by brute force.
[0] https://realkana.com/
[1] https://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects/genki/hira_main....
[2] https://ohelo.github.io/usagi-chan/katakana/
Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard.
However, unlike western writing systems, there's also a third thing which is not an alphabet: Kanji. And this is a world of troubles, because Kanji is literally FUBAR. So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then. Korea used to use Chinese characters too, they eventually (mostly) dropped them in favor of something simpler.
They did consider it in the 20th century when Japan was modernizing and catching up with the Western world. Nowadays nobody takes you seriously if you propose abolishing it. The debate was settled in 1962-1966 [1] when the government officially gave up any attempt to remove kanji from the Japanese writing system. It’s a very much a fringe idea now.
[1]: See 国語国字問題 on Japanese Wikipedia. The full quote is 漢字仮名交じり文が審議の前提。漢字全廃は考えられない。
Japanese words are lengthy compared to English as well. Kanji packs more content into less space.
I agree that the existence of “rare kanji” is a bit strange, but 8,000 or so characters seems reasonable, especially with so many compound kanji.
Another example: Vietnamese swapped from using a modified Chinese script to a (modified?) Latin script.
The first time I visited Japan I set my phone wallpaper to a Katakana chart image and whenever I was waiting around (riding a train/subway, etc) I'd sit and read words on advertising. By the end of the week I no longer needed the chart.
This was back when data was extremely expensive and pocket wifis weren't a thing yet so there were far fewer distractions, I guess that helped...
I can say that after just over three weeks I'm sounding out words. I think hours practiced are a better measure than weeks, but I don't know how many hours I've spent. (Even then sleep seems vital to processing the material, so you can't probably can't just count straight hours you've spent cramming.)
My study has involved using this deck [1]; writing out the hiragana and katakana charts several times; and using Tofugu [2][3] or YouTube for mnemonics, extra explanation, or stroke order.
[0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese
[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/827975112
[2] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
[3] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/
[0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/111623432
(There's also combinations like kyu = ki + small-yu, but that also just builds on the kana you already know, and behaves pretty logically.)
Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.
This is what many people don't realize when they wish they wouldn't have to learn Kanji or Hanzi. They make a lot of sense for languages with lots of homophones.
Edit: typo because of autocomplete
I think you meant homophones. At least I hope so.
- Skritter - Kana (free) - Japanese!
The parent comment is reasonable. Learning hiragana also takes no more than a week or two if you’re actively practicing writing.
(They are not all anki, wanikani, flavor of the month SRS spammers like some of us)
https://github.com/fama-623/Kana-Cards
I speak two languages — English and another language you probably haven't heard of that does not use English-looking letters (such as "a", "b" etc).
Anyway, provided I'm told that a given text is Japanese, I can tell if a letter is Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana.
Which I think is commendable — if I may say so myself — given I didn't even know about the existence of "Kanji", "Katakana", or "Hiragana" until 3 years ago.
One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. Including the text makes it more accessible to a wider audience regardless of what "dialect" is spoken in the show.
This isn't really true; there are characters that are exclusive to one or the other, like 冇. The stronger political position of Mandarin means that its idiosyncratic characters are viewed as "real" while the idiosyncratic characters required by other languages aren't, but it's a fundamentally symmetric situation.
> One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another.
The written versions of the language are also that different. The subtitles are in Mandarin, which everyone must learn to read.
(How common are hard-coded subtitles in modern Chinese media? They're on the older stuff, but it seems like a lot of modern shows don't bother.)
If you see a bare reference to "Chinese", it will be referring to Mandarin.
There are several families of Chinese languages, with the most prominent being:
- 官话 (literally "mandarin speech"; Mandarin belongs to this family)
- 粤语 ("Yue language"; Cantonese belongs to this one)
- 吴语 ("Wu language"; Shanghainese belongs here)
- 闽南语 ("Southern Min language"; Hokkien belongs here)
It's also possible (and routine) to just label a variety of speech with the name of the place where it is spoken. This gives the names of specific dialects rather than broad families:
- 普通话 ("ordinary speech", this is Mandarin. It is conceived of as being an artificial standard rather than being specifically associated with any particular place.)
- 广东话 ("Cantonese", the speech of 广东, which is a large province)
- 上海话 ("Shanghainese", the speech of 上海, which while admittedly a large city is not as large as a province)
- 福建话 ("Hokkien", the speech of 福建, also a large province)
- 北京话 ("Beijingnese", again just a city. This construction applies at pretty much every scope.)
普通话 is the official name of Mandarin, but there are some important synonyms:
- 汉语 ("Han language" - Han is the ethnic term for the Chinese people. As noted, synonymous with Mandarin.)
- 中文 ("Chinese" - here the term is taken from the name of China, 中国. Also synonymous with Mandarin.)
Sometimes harder than you might think.
e.g. consider:
＊ロ口
＊タ夕
＊かカ力
＊りリ (edit: these are more similar in the monotype font in the HN input box than the rendered comment)
Out of curiosity, which language is it? And which writing system are you talking about?