Ok so I’ve never taken to katakana, and still now struggle to read them even though I’ve been studying Japanese for a year. I’m going through a “Common katakana words” deck on kitsun.io to try and get over this but am going crazy trying to figure out whether to insert a dash or a double consonant for long vowel english sounds… Is there any rule? Anything I could implement when answering?
Also any tips on getting over the katakana struggle? (apart from reading it daily, which I do…)
I guess that audio will help a lot, so try searching for the words that you struggle the most on https://forvo.com/ . The method that I’m using is reading the words to myself and make sure that I really elongate the vogals/consonants. That helps figuring out a little better. Plus, I always review the items I got wrong to myself.
I have this app called DR.Moku’s Katakana, I go through everyday and do the writing quiz on my phone, it’s helped my retention and reading speed of katakana a lot. There is also listening and reading quizzes, as well as a word search. Also, it has mnemonics for every katakana character. I can read and write katakana just as well as hiragana now, which is pretty much second nature to me.
I have the same problem. I’ve known Hiragana for years, and reading it is almost second nature now, but although I studied Katakana from the same point, for some reason I’ve never been able to get comfortable with it. I’m really not sure why. They just don’t click. I’m gonna try that Dr. Moku.
@jprspereira Thank you for the tip on differenciating between long vowels/consonnants… For some reason I wasn’t doing that, and now it seems to have clicked! I’m still slow reading, but at least I can input without getting it wrong 90% of the time!
Another thing that I’ve noticed that helps is giving yourself 1 or 2 seconds to think before answering. A lot of times I find myself in review mode too much and I end up answering with nonsense
There’s a complete guide to katakana here with mneumonics
There’s also a katakana game here: Katakana Drag-n-Drop Exercise
If you go to the ultimate guide, it also has practice sheets. It has things written in Katakana and you translate them.
I just want to add here that for people struggling with ツシソン, I’ve seen some complicated tricks for remembering which is which, but I think the easiest way to get them clear in your head is just to practice writing the name of a certain TV show. ‘The Simpsons’ in Japanese is called シンプソンズ, which gives you three of the four commonly confused katakana. If you can get that name down, then you just have to remember that ツ is… the other one.
I actually do something similar. For Evangelion fans out there, Shinji’s name シンジ is spelled using “only the katakana with the dashes on their sides rather than upright”. This helped me lump シ／ン together and distinguish them from ツ／ソ.
I struggled with reading katakana too. What helped me was to learn how to write it - after writing katakana chart several times for a few days, it finally clicked for me
(First few times were while looking up the stroke order. Then trying to write from memory, looking up only when unsure, and then dozen or so times from memory)
