This is awkward… katakana just won’t stick for me. I re-learned it by hammering it into my head around 3 times now, but once i take a break from japanese it always disappears. I’m level 32 on WK and recently started doing Bunpro where I read a lot of sentences that include katakana. I often have to stop on them for a moment or read the english translation to figure out some kana I couldn’t remember.
I know katakana is less popular than hiragana in texts, so I guess it’s natural that since I wasn’t reading anything yet, i didn’t expose myself to enough of it for it to sink in. But i’m wondering, did this happen to you guys too and do you have some magic trick that worked for you?
Same. For some reason the katakana just hasn’t stuck well with me. It doesn’t help that some vocab are so long, I find myself stumbling along trying to sound them out. No problem with hiragana.
I think in the early phases slipping on some katakana is a fairly shared experience. I remember coming across a few times where I hadn’t seen one in a while and slipping up on remembering it. If you’ve learned them once I wouldn’t really sweat it. The trick is to keep reading those sentences (and of course as soon as you can get started, reading real Japanese) and refresh your memory any time it slips. Eventually you’ll stop needing to recheck.
You mention breaks so maybe this changes if you’re regularly taking long breaks, but as much as possible it’s best to avoid that and stay in touch with the language even if only a little per day in busy times.
The magic trick is to beat Katamari Damacy in Japanese, possibly several times. The King speaks almost entirely in katakana, and the font they chose should have been banned under the Geneva Convention with how similar the most problematic characters are.
Jokes aside though, I’ve been learning for a year+ and I’m also struggling with aforementioned characters, and katakana reading speed in general. I’ve tried a separate deck, tried writing it in ringotan, adding katakana cards to my own deck. So far the improvement is not drastic, but it’s definitely there. I suppose the root of the problem is we’re getting a lot less exposure to katakana than the other writing systems, and the only way to solve that is to get more exposure.
I think that’s basically it – my impression is katakana take longer to be natural to read than hiragana for just about everybody, and I assume that’s because you don’t get them in every sentence, just in words every so often.
There are some mnemonic and similar tricks to help with remembering which way around the lookalike sets like ソ/ツ/ン/シ go, but beyond that it’s time and practice.
i’m a map nerd, so it was reading japanese maps of the world just a few times that solidified katakana for me https://happylilac.net/wmap-c1-a2.pdf (this is designed to be printed out for children’s classrooms so the format is weird but it’s zoomed at least)
Glad to hear that I’m not the only one with this. I’ll try an Anki deck with katakana vocab, maybe that will increase my exposure to it a bit more and help retain it for longer.
This map is really cool too, some readings are really funny too
if i feel like i’m rusty (especially with some of the kana that aren’t used as often) a run through Katakana : Real Kana tends to help me out. used it more when I was first starting out so it’s not something i’ve needed in a while. reading the news daily helps with that.
For me there are two levels of difficulty with katakana: remembering the characters themselves and then getting a feel for how the (mostly) English vocab gets transcribed into it. Figuring out that ツアー is “tour” is far from obvious at first…
What helped me was going through a dedicated katakana Anki deck with a thousand pure katakana words. It brought my katakana game on par with my hiragana. Then, once you start reading seriously, katakana are all over the place so you just get a ton of practice whether you like it or not.
Videogames in particular tend to be extremely katakana-heavy:
In addition to video games, katakana ends up a lot in works that are translations/adaptations of non-Japanese works.
So since I like to read book adaptions of Disney movies…. I was even considering getting the Japanese version of Wicked, which would have a fair amount of katakana with all the names of people and also buildings and areas.
What really helps me with katakana is reading it in places where the context is obvious, and especially of course when it’s accompanied by English text, which is surprisingly common in Japan.
Like, the Pokemon Cafe’s logo contains the words “Pokemon Cafe” in English, which makes it a lot easier to read “ポケモンカフェ” after that. No shame in having the English to help you out as a reminder. And having to stop for a moment is fine too.
Beyond literally seeing the English for the same word, seeing katakana words with pictures or repeated multiple times helps a ton.
Manga and video games can help a lot with this. Manga because it often comes with a picture of the thing they’re talking about in katakana, and video games because they often use katakana for the same words over and over and they’re often words important to the game. Like if the more times you see “ポーション” in an RPG the more likely you are to remember it says “potion.”
All that being said, I do still forget the subtleties of katakana from time to time, like which one is ソ and which one is ン. And my ability to write katakana is pretty terrible. But you can get by surprisingly far just by going “okay i can read 40% of the katakana here, and there’s a picture of melonpan here, so this probably says “melonpan””.
I struggle with katakana as well, mainly because I rarely come across them.
I added the Wanikani katakana for onyomi script a few weeks ago to try and tackle the issue.
It replaces the hiragana with katakana when you type during kanji reviews (when Wanikani expects the onyomi reading, which is not always the case).
It’s too early to tell if it’s working, but at least I’m exposed to katakana on a daily basis now
Not really a groundbreaking trick or anything😅, but for katakana and hiragana, I bought a little notebook and a stack of blank flashcards.
On one side of a flashcard I wrote for example “ma”, and on the other side I wrote “ま” and “マ”. And I did this for all the katakana/hiragana.
Then I made myself a quick routine where once a day I would shuffle the cards, draw one at a time, look at the english sound (“ma” or “ka” or so on), and write down the hiragana and katakana in my notebook.
At first it would take me like 20 minutes or so to get through it. But after a couple of weeks, I would rifle through all the cards and have everything written down in maybe 5 minutes.
I did this routine for a couple of months and at some point it felt like hiragana and katakana recognition became so natural that I stepped away from doing it and haven’t had too many issues since😁.
to be honest, i have less problems recognizing the reading of katakana but more problems with sounding it all out and being dumbfounded because it’s juuuust slightly not how you’d say the english word and my brain just freezes. then when I finally figure it out i’m like ‘oh yeah of course…’
Related but no Katakana word has sent me for a loop trying to figure out what it is like オーバーツーリズム
If you aren’t able to write them, I’d suggest adding that to just recognition. I just tried to write them out once a day from memory in my notebook until I got to the point where I could do them all, and that helped with recognition as well - e.g. learning the proper stroke order helps when differentiating the characters in the horribly ugly example Zaichiki posted.
In terms of speeding up recognition massively, as some other people have said, games are an amazing option, especially as specific games like Pokemon etc. are absolutely littered with them everywhere. Pokemon easily quadrupled my katakana reading speed and bed it in pretty permanently.
(Living in Japan also helps because they’re much more frequently encountered on menus and buildings etc but obviously that’s not the most helpful).
just put me down please
