hi there, I was wondering if there`s a similar app or website to WaniKani to learn Hiragana and Katakana.
or does someone has some useful tipps and tricks to learn those alphabets quite quickly ?
thank you all
4 Likes
Hi!
For a good (free) starter resource, I like IRODORI. You have to sign up with your email address, but it doesnât cost anything.
The introduction section teaches hiragana and katakana and looks pretty effective to me. (But I already knew them before I started, so no first-hand testimonial)
After teaching it to you in a logical order, the practice section has flash-card like quizzes.
1 Like
I wrote them down multiple time a day everyday for two weeks. Done.
6 Likes
By using them!
I learnt hiragana here in wanikani.
Also, for katakana, I switched kunyomi readings to use katakana and that helped me a lot.
Itâs when you use them that your brain truly learns them.
1 Like
I used this
Tofugu is the same company that makes wanikani, its not flashcards but its mnemonics and a quiz, this is how I learned my kana and it took 2 days for both
7 Likes
This is how I learned kana as well! I spent 1 day on hiragana and 1 day on katakana and that was enough time to get comfortable with each of them. Granted my reading speed was slow at first, but I was able to read nonetheless. Itâs almost been a year since then for me, and itâs crazy to think about how long itâs been since I last even needed to think about the original mnemonics!
Incase they miss the katakana article at the bottom of that page, hereâs that one as well: Learn Katakana: The Ultimate Guide
1 Like
yeah its honestly really efficient
I used a Web app like this one: https://www.hiraganaquiz.com/
Despite it working, I feel like it wasnât necessarily the most efficient method. writing the characters by hand seemed more productive.
In my experience, having just one sound each, a universally agreed ordering, and no inherent meaning, makes kana a lot easier to learn. Theyâre alphabet-like, which kanji very much are not.
Duolingo has a pretty good set of kana drills, and itâs free.
1 Like
Iâd recommend an app called Kana Town. Not sure about iOS but itâs on Android.
It has a tab for hiragana and katakana separately, and you can quiz yourself on them similar to WaniKani reviews.
Just brute force your way through it by taking a test of all hiragana/katakana until you get 100%.
I already knew hiragana when I used it but I learned all of katakana after 15-20 attempts.
1 Like
The Tofugu tests over, and over. Worked really fast for me.
And Kana Town is great, but I think itâs not supported for new Androids anymore.
1 Like
Ah, thatâs a shame. I used it a few years back and would recommend it to absolute beginners.
1 Like
Flashcards and/or writing the characters on paper.
Seconding flash cards. I bought a deck but really just writing them on paper suffices. Nothing fancy needed. It helps to have a complete kana set with the digraphs and diacritics, and not just the base 46 for each set. I think the full set comes out to something around 218? Flashcards for an hour a day for 4-7 days is a worthwhile time investment IMO. No fancy SRS or app needed.
1 Like
Oh yeah, thatâs a good point. In retrospect I felt like the characters + rendaku made it a little harder to remember than one would assume based on the fact that the rendaku is just a phonetic âadd-onâ.
@IrinaPobo I would recommend putting extra effort into katakana by the way. Once youâre past the âkana phaseâ, katakana doesnât appear nearly as often as one would need to keep the characters in memory which makes it harder to read when katakana words appear in text.
That and katakana is a lot more unpredictable than hiragana by nature. The word being sounded out may be difficult to synthesis in your brain but once you hear a recording of it youâll slap yourself in the face for not recognizing it⊠sometimes. Oftentimes itâs just a made-up word, a location youâve never heard of, a foreign name or a foreign loanword youâve never encountered, or some technical or fantasy/scifi term that only has specialized meaning.
Fantastic example of an unintuitive word if youâve never seen it before: ăłăłăă„ăŒăżăŒ. âKonpyoo taaâŠ?â I remember being hung up on this the first time I saw it 20 something years ago.
1 Like
Yes, when it comes to katakana itâs almost âanything goesâ, but as my teacher explained it to me, sometimes the Japanese equivalent fits only a limited context so the word doesnât have as broad of a meaning as the English origin.