How did you memorize Hiragana?

[ニッキー]

Then, ditch anything that has romaji in it. It's basically just robbing you of more hiragana/katakana reading practice. The sooner you take away the romaji crutch, the better off you'll be.

Quoted just 'cause I totally agree.

This all said, I still have to stop and think when I want to write マ and ム. Not sure why, but those two are going to plague me forever.

You could try and come up with a visual thing to distinguish them... to me, マ is more like 'A' because the corner is at the top, and 'ム' is more like U because the corner is at the bottom.

Otherwise, I'd suggest finding a way to use them as much as you can (use a guy called マーク and ベトナム in all your examples or something), I had so much trouble with シ and ツ at first, but I ended up using ッ so much (especially since I write my name with it) that I have no problems with them anymore.

[Ben Nielson]

Yeah, usually it's just something that pops up while I'm writing.

No mnemonic has stuck yet, really... then again, I haven't given it any real effort either, I think. It's just something I noticed everytime I have to write one of them (which is pretty rare, obviously...).

I'm not so worried about it, just mentioned it because it's funny... I think everyone probably has something that shouldn't be a problem for them yet for some reason it still is...

[furrykef]

Then, ditch anything that has romaji in it. It's basically just robbing you of more hiragana/katakana reading practice. The sooner you take away the romaji crutch, the better off you'll be.

I think that's going too far. I wouldn't ditch my Barron's Japanese Grammar just because it doesn't use kana.

Now, all else being equal, definitely take kana over romaji. The thing is, all else is seldom equal, though.

- Kef

[Ben Nielson]

Yup, the Barron's grammar book was a solid introductory tool for me too.

I've been properly corrected. Then again, if you were to look at my Barron's book you'd see tons of hiragana written above almost everything in romaji... heh.

[somenube]

...I went hardcore, my friend introduced me to Japanese and I googled it and found a list of kana. I wrote the kana over and over by themselves and eventually into words. In two weeks I could "write and read" the kana. It took one month of reading baby books and writing sentences over and over till I finally "mastered" them. (I can read the kana almost as fast my English.) I didn't use romaji at all except when doing flash-cards (I used my own phonetic spelling) and later on when I entered a Japanese class and was forced to anyway! （ローマ字が大嫌いですな。　DX）
Kanji...thats a different matter entirely...

[Ben Nielson]

Oh yeah, if anyone wants to get faster at reading kana (or, really Japanese in general), do some Japanese karaoke. Seriously. It gets you reading crazy fast...

[becki_kanou]

Oh yeah, if anyone wants to get faster at reading kana (or, really Japanese in general), do some Japanese karaoke. Seriously. It gets you reading crazy fast...

I think that's good advice. When I was on a homestay we went out to karaoke all the time and it definitely improved my kanji and speed-reading, since by the nature of karaoke you already know the readings for all the kanji if you know the words to the song.

[sushidushi]

What I would recommend is http://www.languagebug.com/kana_q/index.htm --

I can't get this to work. How does one edit a jad file...? I love the idea of getting something on my mobile phone, but I just can't do it.