hiragana-the easy way

[sgtkwol]

This is for anyone as new as I am to Japanese. First thing is to write the whole set of hiragana down character by character, stroke by stroke. Then do the grammer and vocabulary strictly in English and Japanese. Do not use an romaji to write any of your words. Your mind will get sick of looking up all the characters over and over, and you learn them. Another advantage is that you can learn as quickly as possible, instead of 5 characters a day or similar method. With any luck this should bring you down to 6-10 characters giving you problems based on frequency of use, similarity, and the complexity of the human brain. Then you have to just memorize them. Now I just need to keep practicing using hiragana, and I will add in as much kanji as my brain can handle. Now I can only hope that the kanji can go as well as the hiragana (only took me 7 days). If anyone has tips on katakana, let me know, for now I will just stick with the purely Japanese stuff.

[faan-san]

To practice writing in hiragana, go to a place like animelyrics.com and find a song in roumaji. Then, re-write it in hiragana. ^_^ Easy practice, and it may help you memorize your favorite song a bit better.

[mandolin]

katakana is used for japanese stuff as well. When you read "katakana is for foreign words" what this really means is "katakana is for foreign-based words, but they are still japanese words.

Katakana is also used for emphasis of normally hiragana-written characters, sort of like when english speakers use italics or bold type.

Don't skip katakana just because you think it's not japanese enough.

You'll want to learn it before you learn kanji, since ON-readings are usually printed in katakana.