Do I Need Katakana In the Beginning?

That’s a good point:

スタート
ロ—ド
セーブ
メニュー
パスワード
コンチニュー
オプション

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Get to it!! Like everyone is saying, it is super important. You wouldn’t stop learning the Latin Alphabet at around the letter N right? :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’d say it’s more comparable to only learning lowercase, and skipping uppercase. Not a great idea either way.

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Another saying you’ll find only in Katakana:

メリークリスマス :christmas_tree:

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For these, I felt tracing them helps a lot.
With the correct stroke order of course :slight_smile: they feel natural and easy to distinguish after a while.

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I don’t know if this helps, but it’s you look up the source kanji on the Wikipedia ‘Kana’ page, you’ll realise that there are a lot of overlaps between hiragana and katakana sources. That means it might take you less effort, especially if you know those kanji already (or at least something similar). Here’s an example: つ and ツ both come from 川. If you know the correct stroke order, you’ll realise つ is just a linked-up version of ツ with the bumps smoothed out. That’s one of the commonly confused katakana down. Same thing with そ and ソ: the upper ‘7’ in そ is just a linked-up (cursive!) version of ソ. That’s another one down. し and シ are the same. That leaves us with… one commonly confused katakana: ン. That one doesn’t share its origin kanji with its hiragana counterpart (ん). But what are you going to confuse it with now that you’ve learnt all the rest?

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This is interesting, and I haven’t given a thought to the origin of kana in a long time. I am going to spend a little time with kana.

Here is the image of origins from wikipedia
image

also this chart shows regular character, cursive script, and hiragana
image

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To be honest, as a Chinese speaker who already knew kanji, this is how I learnt kana. I wanted something that would justify why each kana represented a certain sound. (Come to think of it, maybe this is also part of how I learnt to guess on’yomi from pronunciation in Mandarin.)

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