I was having trouble distinguishing between certain Hiragana, so I made this chart!

Thank you for the pointers! I’ll be copying the stroke order from that video to help me memorize them!

And I’ll be seeing Hiragana in the vocab and Kanji pronunciations.

Do you know if Japanese video games typically use Kanji in subtitles and text, or do they stick to Kana? Should I try learning to read Japanese written in Kana, or simply pursue Kanji with Kana and learn to read both right away?

I’m obviously on WaniKani, so I plan to learn Kanji, but I am just curious if I should maybe focus my efforts more or less on Kanji.

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I focused on learning hiragana and katakana before anything else. I think that is the path most people take. It will be hard to learn kanji if you are also struggling with kana and looking them up for every reading.

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I still have trouble distinguishing between big and small つ/っ when written vertically. It brings me great shame.

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It totally shouldn’t :smiley: . Bad handwriting is a thing even in Japanese. Next step - deciphering those katakana sounds. ギーギー
Here’s the title page of Blue Flag, for instance:

EDIT:
This was a little vague of me, apologies. I meant handwriting with the above screenie, not onomatopoeic katakana words :smiley: .

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Welcome!!! 頑張て下さい!!!!! Don’t worry you will understand then sentence soon enough :slight_smile:
When I first started learning Japanese I used an app called Kana found on the app store, it basically a water-downed srs system that lets you practice stroke order and has automated pronunciation each time you get an answer right. STRONGLY RECOMMEND IT! Thanks to the app I felt I had a good grasp of both hiragana and katakana in under a month, just wait until you start learning kanji that is when the real fun starts!

PS, Remember language learning takes years and years and if you keep at it maybe after 3-5 years you will have a good grasp of the language depending on your learning pace, I wish you all the luck and hope you have the stamina required to learn a new language best regards, the king of pirates :slight_smile:

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i agree, handwriting is a totally different beast… I guess that’s one of the things you get used to with time, but it definitely throws me off (as do funky fonts)

(also, good manga!)

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Sorry for the late and long reply, I saw your post earlier and had been meaning to reply but kept being too busy, I just remembered today.

For learning Hiragana (and Katakana) I also grouped similar kana together and combined that with making stories and pictures (like what WK does for kanji).

I used to have a lot of trouble from wa わ, ne ね, re れ

wa is a WAsp, notice the wings

re is a person wREtching over

ne is a kitty cat (NEko in Japanese), notice the curled happy tail

You can find these pictures and more in this article or this chart, there is a longer list of charts here. If you google for “Hiragana mnemonics” and “Hiragana pictures” you’ll hopefully find a bunch.

I combined a few of these charts, trying to find images that stuck well for me, with coming up with a few of my own.

As silly as it sounds I found it helpful to find words that uses these confusing pairs together, For example I kept struggling with differentiating me め and nu ぬ and for some reason the English word menu めぬ helped ?!?

For katakana a lot of the characters are very close, so I made little diagram of their relationships which helped

  nu ヌ
   ^
   |
  fu フ --> wa ワ --> u ウ
   |
   v
  ku ク --> ke ケ

If you aren’t already you might want to consider flash cards. For kana I used physical paper flash cards to learn them, after the initial phase I switched to Anki (flash card software) and revise a few each day.

I still mix up some characters, but I can usually figure them out from context similar to what I do in English, it will slowly get easier over time.

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Oh man, that’s perfect. You just cured that confusion for me too!

That’s also helpful, thank you! I see you have the simplest characters on the left and progress in complexity. I haven’t mastered katakana yet, so this is great!

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I have absolutely no idea why that menu tricked worked for me, it’s just as surprising if it works for you too :thinking:

Right!
To be more specific I view these characters as kind of starting from the base of fu フ and then each arrow is adding more to it. I thought of them this way to try seeing the parts of the character separately.

I still think this way if I get confused between ku ク and ke ケ, I think about how ke feels/sounds sharper than ku and that is why is has the extra spike on the right side.

In Hiragana here are some similar patterns, with the arrow adding something extra

ha は --> ho ほ
sa さ --> ki き
ro ろ --> ru る

I don’t use all of these patterns in mnemonics, for me it was more an exercise to teach my eye to break down the characters and actually see the pieces, rather than seeing it all as a messy blob.

Sometimes these do make it into mnemonics, for example Ro ろ is a Road, Ru る is an even Ruder road (just look at that nasty turn).

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Nice, that will help too! These mnemonics are so helpful!

I can tell the rude road mnemonic is gonna stick too, lmao.

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Depends on the game, children’s games tend to have more kana while games geared towards adults will use more kanji. However - unless you have a really good grasp on the grammar, parsing kana only sentences with no spaces and unfamiliar words can be quite a bit more difficult than just having to look up a few kanji.

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^Adding to that, some games have a kana or kanji option. And some games provide a furigana toggle for kanji. For example Pokémon games have distinct kana and kanji language options in their menu, you can only pick one and have to stick with for the rest of the game tho. Skyward Sword HD, which I’m playing right now, has furigana option in its menu. It does help me especially when dealing with alternate readings for the same kanji. Game leans to more archaic usage of grammar and speech styles in general.

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