Learn Katakana and Hiragana in 2 weeks

So the first thing I guess you are probably saying is, it can’t be true. You are wrong, but there is a catch, you know that all important catch. It will take about 4 weeks to fully develop skill with them. However, in 2 weeks you can know what all the natural sounds and characters are for Hirigana and Katakana. The second catch is, it isn’t necessarily easy.

This methods is like carving a statue out of stone you grab the big chisel and start whacking away until you get a roughed in idea of what the statue will look like. Then you take smaller chisels to add more detail to it. This method in 2 weeks will give you the rough idea so that for the next 2 weeks you can better solidify it.

So what is the method?

Flashcards

Now, if you have been reading my blog for very long you probably know that I am a firm supporter of SRS, but sometimes flashcards are the way to go as it gives you a little more control. In the case of quickly learning kana we need to do very specific things that are harder to do with an SRS program.

First thing to know is we are only going to learn the natural sounds. The natural sounds differ because they don’t have the two little tic marks above the character. Here are a couple of examples of natural vs non-natural.

Natural: す
Non: ず

Natural: ス
Non: ズ

Natural: ふ
Non: ぷ

Here is a chart of hiragana and katakana

Hiragana

Katakana

Please notice on the left side you have your basic vowels and move right for all the natural sounds and the corresponding characters. Please try to memorize the groupings and the image as it will help you later to distinguish groups if you can picture it in your head.

Now to start learning them. Take one group at a time so start with a, i, u, e, o (あ, い, う, え, お) in Hirigana and write them down on index cards and repeat through them over and over again until you go through them about 10 times without messing up. Then mix up the cards and go again about 10 times or more with no mistakes. I recommend doing the first set in the morning.

Next you need to do another set of characters in the afternoon. Go through 10 new cards a day 5 in the morning 5 in the evening. So in this case since we are on day 1 add ka, ki, ku, ke, ko (か, き, く, け, こ). Go through these five in order until you get them about 10 times. Then mix up the 5 go through them until you can get them with no mistakes 10 or more times. Now add the 5 from the morning and go through all 10 of the cards about 50 times with no mistakes. It will probably take a long time to do, but you will benefit. As a side note it might be a good idea to carry them around and just go through them leisurely when you are not adding new cards.

So for day two you want to do sa, shi, su, se and so (さ, し, す, せ, そ) in the morning until you can do them 10 times with out mistake.  You then want to add yesterdays 10 cards and do all 15 cards 10 times without mistakes.  In the afternoon on day two now you want to do another 5 new cards; ta, chi, tsu, te, and to (た, ち, つ, て,  と) 10 times without mistakes.  Next add in the 5 from the morning and the 10 from the day before and go through all 20 until you can do them about 50 times with no mistakes.

To sum up:

1. Learn 5 new cards in the morning
2. Add those 5 to the previous day/days cards
3. In the afternoon learn 5 new cards and add them to the morning and previous day/days cards
4. At the end of the day be sure you can do all cards 50 times with no mistakes
5. Repeat all steps next day

There are a couple of negatives to this method. It will get harder as you go, and will take A LOT of time; but will be worth it. At the end of the two weeks they last few days worth of characters will be a bit harder to remember because of less exposure, but just keep practicing and they will get easier. Finally, you will be shaky in your recognition for a bit, but that is okay because you just roughed in your knowledge and by now you probably know them all well. Be careful though you might not be able to write them very quickly, but don’t worry the more you write the easier it will get.

Okay we just went through a few negatives, but here are the benefits. You will know Katakana and Hirigana. This will go a long way in learning much more quickly instead of spending all your time in romaji land. As soon as I put myself through something similar and learned Katakana and Hiragana I immediately stopped romaji and Japanese comprehension went up because i was no longer converting in my head. The number one benefit is you will have learned the basis of the Japanese written language which will help in everything you do in Japanese.

After 2 weeks

So now hopefully you have spent 2 weeks going after learning Katakana and Hiragana and have a rough idea of them all and can start to recognize them much easier. Now it is time for the next step, time to put them in long term memory and allow you to quickly recognize them on the fly. For that you need not go any further than smart.fm once there go through the Katakana and Hiragana lists and take advantage of the SRS abilities. This will help you get those pesky characters in your long term memory and get you started on the unnatural sounds and characters that are also important. I would also suggest about halfway through the lists start doing the brainspeed to work on the on-the-fly recognition of the characters. Finally, start writing using those new characters you have learned that way you can get used to using them.

Hopefully this is helpful this is very similar to what I did, but a little more rigorous. It took me about 3 weeks of doing this exact thing at a super leisurely pace, but I got them in a short time because of the brute force method of getting them in my brain. After those 3 weeks I could start to read Japanese a bit and was getting along much better in my book and things finally started making sense, but it wasn’t until the SRS on smart.fm and the brainspeed that I solidified the knowledge and for the last 7 to 8 months have been able to read and write hiragana and katakana just fine.

Related Posts:

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• Figuring Out Those Unknown Kanji in Your Non-Digital Book
• 5 Ways to Use Subtitles to Learn Japanese
• How To Learn Japanese

Tagged as: Kana, Tutorial