Learning Hiragana & Katakana

[Capone3830]

So, basically my problem after watchin tons of anime was, that I had the base knowledge I needed to speak some japanese, but when it came to reading, and it wasnt in romaji, i was irredeemable lost. So after searching for a while I found this awesome site which I now want to introduce to you.

http://smart.fm/series/3322

With this application I learned Hiragana in about 4 hours. (pure study time, done over a longer time) and right now I'm learnin Katakana and am quite far aswell. Anyway. If you want to give it a try, go ahead and do it, you won't regret it.

(actually in my opinion its kinda fun if you see yourself learnin that fast, and understanding these signs you never even nearly could decipher before)

[jadeliciousdk]

This is actually useful, I have had the exact same problem. Perhaps now I can get a grasp at this missing piece of the puzzle

[Capone3830]

It really helped me to associate the signs with something i am familar with. for example

て is "te" and in german "t" is pronounced as "te". since "te" looks similar to "t" that one was pretty easy to remember.

[rakusa]

katakan was easier than hiragana

i already knew how to write katakana so i'll go with katakan :D

[nekolover]

I already know how to read katakana and hiragana the problem is i dont understand what im reading yet i only know about 110 japanese words and most of it are adjectives. although learning the other writing they use often called kanji is a bit of a problem cause they commonly use about 10,000 characters based on what i read from wikipedia so it might take 5 years to fully understand their writing without katakana/hragana tranlations.

took me bout 5 4 hours of study time too to memorize katakana and hiragana.

[inubazh11]

I can't believe I learned Japanese. Great site. Thanks

[Mei14]

Thanks to you, I might just finally learn katakana xD I had already learned hiragana, but then got lazy so I didn't really learn my katakana well lol

[kinglucario]

I actually use an app for my iPhone that gives lessons and quizzes and helps u with the sounds of how they are pronounced

[kimono031]

Too bad it isn't free anymore :c

[Anytimelol]

I tried the free trial is was pretty neat, my head started hurting after awhile tho too much info haha trying to memorize all the words was alot for me X_X

[kimono031]

There are settings to adjust how much you take in at a time, and how often you review. I was a member of smart.fm for a while, and I mainly liked it because of the user decks, and it was free. Now all the vocab is by the company and its not free anymore. D;

[Anytimelol]

Ah I didn't know that! too bad it isn't free anymore.. But even if they charge its still a good deal I think since it seems to be a pretty good program.

[kimono031]

It is, you actually can learn a lot. I've remembered/can retain almost almost half of the words I learned from smart.fm. I studied about 1000 words - I didn't even put much effort into it. If I would have taken it seriously, which I should have because I have to pay now :c, I would have learned a lot more.

[tasticalcure]

Just gonna say here that although katakana looks easier to memorize, they are goddamn hard to remember sooner, since it's only used in japanese loan words. Plus kanji will make your attempts on reading japanese difficult (Just imagine, 20 strokes for a homophone of ”o”?)