Reddit reviews Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each
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It's not targeting you in particular, but I've seen posts like this before and well, I don't understand why people interpret the Kana as a lengthy step that needs to be supplemented. It's 48 characters with no meaning besides sound -- pure memorization. If one needs to supplement additional readings or lessons with this, you are ignoring the issue at heart, memorize 48 characters.
If you sit down and completely focus, Hiragana is a 3 hour memorization job, naturally, if it takes you a few days, so be it, but the point is to have it internalized first. I bet many can do it in even less if they really applied themselves. Sit down, grab a coffee, pull up a table and just memorize it. Don't do anything else Japanese related until you have this down (Notice I'm not even asking for Katakana here, just Hiragana--think about what namasensei said! "Just effing write it down!!"). If you're really struggling, this book is fantastic.
Once you memorized it in however amount of hours it takes, just test and test yourself over and over again.
Anyways, I think you get my point. To me, learning Hiragana is like learning the alphabet. It's the first thing anybody does before anything else, there's no supplement to it, there's no complimentary grammar lesson that fits nicely with it, it's just a straight up 48 character memorization process we all have to go through to get our foot in the door.
It's a very expensive way to learn nothing.
Here's some stuff to help you get into Hiragana/Katakana (6 study hours only)
Remembering the Hiragana in 3 Hours - Memrise Course
Remembering the Katakana in 3 Hours - Memrise Course
Remembering the Kana Video Series - Youtube
Remembering the Kana in 6 Hours by James Heisig - book
Hey! Good to see someone interested in East Asian languages! The CJKV writing system normally throws a lot of people off.
CJK Writing System
I wrote a short little rant a while back on how the characters are constructed that you might want to read.
There are methods of learning the characters that make use of their structure. Heisig's RtK and RtH books (Amazon link) are the most well known books I think. Fansites such as Reviewing the Kanji and Reviewing the Hanzi also exist which you might want to take a look at.
Not sure if you like RtK? Here's the sampler. See if you like it after learning 276 characters~
Chinese-Specific
The only thing headache inducing about any Chinese dialect is the writing system and tones.
Note that though we call them "dialects", it is a matter of politics as most of them are mutually unintelligible. A Cantonese or Mandarin speaker is unlikely to understand a Hokkien speaker at all, for example.
Written chinese, on the other hand, is in Mandarin and only in Mandarin -- the other dialects do not have writing systems. Well... the notable exception is Written Cantonese, but that's can be seen as a variant of standard written chinese.
Oh! There are have two variants of the standard writing system: Simplified and Traditional. I had learnt the former in school, and I can read the latter after learning about the simplification process, so just pick one and stick with it.
I personally find Mandarin grammar to quite simple. This might be because it's an isolating language.
Japanese-Specific
Japanese folk have an easier time with Chinese characters. While 6000 Hanzi is roughly college-level (I think?) in Chinese, 6000 Kanji in Japanese is probably more-than-you-need-to-know-ever. There is a Kanji Aptitude Test which is pretty much the only reason one would learn that many.
However, Japanese also have two syllabaries you'll need to know (~50 syllables each). These are phonetic, so they shouldn't pose much of a challenge; most who learn Japanese learn both of them in one or two weeks.
Essential:
Beginner resources:
Books to get:
Mixed collection of Online Resources:
Actually, I'm glad you asked because I gave you the wrong title. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0824831640/
Wanikani is a website.
I learned Japanese for a few years a while back. I 100% agree with the recommendation for Tae Kim's Grammar Guide. It pulls no punches and gets you from nothing to the point where you can have basic conversations.
If you know what Kana and Kanji are keep reading. If not, just go through Tae Kim's Introduction and Guide to Writing quickly and then continue.
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Now to learn Kana, how experienced are you with language learning? If you're a total beginner, Remembering the Kana is what I used, but just grind out the Hiragana and Katakana. There's like dozens of free guides. If you have prior linguistic experience Fluent Forever's Guide to Japanese Pronunciation is absolutely fantastic and a must-watch but it's pretty technical.
In terms of Kanji, decide if you want to learn it and how committed do you want to be. Are you determined to know all useful Kanji? Are you willing to only learn to read Kanji as you come across them? Do you want to ignore them all together?
If you want to "master" Kanji, Hesig's Remembering the Kanji is insane. In ~90 days I learned to write all 2000 Jouyou Kanji. The goal of the program is to get you to the same point of a Chinese speaker learning Japanese. So you know all the characters, but you know zero Japanese. So I couldn't read. I couldn't speak. All I could do was point to a character and tell you its English meaning. Then I just went through Tae Kim learning Japanese words as I came across them.
If you really want to "master" the Kanji, Hesig's way is imo the best. But it's a huge time commitment (3-4 months) for a payoff that only matters if you're into Japanese for the longhaul. If it's your first time learning a language or you don't wanna put in the time, either try another way to learn the Kanji or skip Hesig and just learn them as you go through Tae Kim. You can always come back to it if you decide later on that Kanji really matter to you. (Don't feel like this is a cop-out! I actively decided to not learn characters while I was learning Chinese because I care far more about speaking than reading).
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Best of luck! Japanese is a great language to learn :)
Im just going to post my answer from a different thread. You do not really need a book but I like learning with mnemonics.
Now for the two Kana systems I can recommend Remembering the Kana if you like mnemonics.
Also I highly recommend two Anki (A SRS learning tool that is free) decks.
The first one being for Hiragana. This one has Rōmaji on one side and the Hiragana on the other side. It tests you both ways and also has pronunciation audio files with it.
The second one I recommend is for Katakana. This one has Hiragana on one side and Katakana on the other side. It also tests you both ways and has audio with it. This will cement your Hiragana knowledge and also help you learn Katakana.
Best luck with your learning efforts :D
I can understand where you're coming from if you have a full time job and a family.
Back when I learned the kana I was 19 years old in college. I had all the free time in the world so I think I practiced for close to 16 hours spread over the first few days so I could get it all down. I used this book which worked very well for me.
Then after my initial memorization I had opportunities to practice by doing work in my textbook for class. That was 2009.
After the class was over I didn't try to learn Japanese further for nearly 5 years. I had a friend back then who would give me his Jump manga and I would read the stories in them even though I couldn't understand a single sentence. All for the sake of kana reading practice.
Once I started going through a textbook again and taking it seriously back in 2014 I still remembered how to read kana because of my effort.
There are loads of apps if you have a smartphone. This and this are usually recommended.
Definitely make flashcards! And learning to write them will help recognition too.
Here is a quick & dirty way to quickly master the two Japanese phonetic alphabets (you could probably easily offset the cost of the book by betting skeptical friends or acquaintances a pitcher or two of beer):
Background: interview with the author:
The book is Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each (link to Amazon Jpn) by James Heisig
Reading it/learning it is a charm. It's just like one of those choose your own adventure books you may have read as a child. Seriously.
The upshoot is that mastering the phonetic alphabet won't make you fluent in Japanese but it will give you a big boost. When traveling, it could make the difference in you looking up and spotting a sign indicating "capsule hotel" or whatever you're trying to find. Plus, it'll give you an advantage when trying to communicate with locals who don't speak English.
You're young. You'll have a much easier time learning Japanese if you start now.
http://ankisrs.net/
http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0824831640
http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0824835921
For Kana, I have this https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/749749.Kana_Pict_o_Graphix as well as this https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Reading-Japanese-Syllabaries/dp/0824831640 .
I used to know all hiragana and most of the kana because of this book. (Reviews are right, btw: hiragana section is excellent, katakana section is meh.)
Now I can only remember a few of the mnemonics, so it's back to "short two character A+ ranked" and "really long name with stars and that nose-looking thing intended to be a nose."
I'm gonna assume that you're starting completely from scratch, so just skip over parts that you already know.
Firstly, Japanese consists of three writing systems: Hiragana and Katakana, which correspond to each other/use the same sounds, and are syllable based. It is extremely important that you learn hiragana, and learn it well. Katakana is easy to learn later on as you'll already have the foundation/a basic understanding of Japanese phonology/sounds. Then there're kanji, which you've most likely heard of: Chinese characters. There are roughly 1700 of these used by the average Japanese person*. So:
1.5. If you have the money (or the means...) you might want to go through an audio course quickly in order to pick up the pronunciation/listening skills and some basic conversational vocab. Michel Thomas is supposedly good, though I favour Assimil myself. Assimil is made for being used over the course of 100 days (1 lesson/day), which can be really nice as it gives you somewhere to start and stop, so to speak.
\2. Get yourself a textbook. Genki I and II are fine, but they can be a bit pricey, and are made for use in a classroom. I use Japanese the Manga Way myself, which is really neat if you're planning on reading manga in Japanese eventually, and isn't all that expensive. there are other alternatives as well, which I'm sure someone will tell you about shortly, haha. Tae Kim and TextFugu are, as far as I know, the only internet-based textbooks worth considering. Tae Kim is 100% free and will teach you about as much grammar as Genki I and II will, while TextFugu is a one-time payment and will teach you a bit more than Genki I, I think.
\3. You might want to start learning kanji/vocabulary while going through your textbook. Wanikani.com is good, as it teaches both, and does it really efficiently. It is subscription-based, however ($10 a month I think).
tl;dr: kana, textbook, kanji/vocab while doing textbook stuffs.
Also, stay away from Rosetta Stone. It's expensive, not very good for non-European languages, and there are free resources that are several times better.
がんばって！
*some people will correct me and say 2000+ because that's what the Jouyou kanji say (don't worry about this for now), but fact is that the last 300-400 are not used a lot.
With good mnemonics you can learn each in a day. Buy this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Reading-Japanese-Syllabaries/dp/0824831640
...it's full of great imagery like け="cape and dagger" and の="no parking sign".
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