I have a kid who asked me to teach him Japanese. He’s 11, and we’ve been meeting for almost two months, yet he can hardly read anything. I’ve tried pictures, writing, just plain recognition. He simply can’t get it. His mother asked for resources the very first time we met, so of course, I sent some. I guarantee he is not using them based on his progress and how he never mentions them. Is there some way I can up his hiragana proficiency faster if he doesn’t do anything himself? It doesn’t matter to me if I have to repeat it for him, but I can only imagine he’s frustrated since he can’t do much without being able to read. When I was first beginning, hiragana and katakana were never an issue, so encountering someone who struggles makes it hard for me to know how to introduce things when I’ve explained the same concepts over and over again. It just feels like it’s going to get more and more past his depth when we have to move on to katakana and kanji.
Does he want to be able to read?
If not, kana are a lot of hard work…
I saw another thread about language learning difficulties in adulthood but motivation, focus and attention are massive.
Maybe get him into Karate or anime 
When he says he wants to “learn Japanese” what does he mean? Does he just want to be able to speak Japanese? It might be more motivating to speak some Japanese first and then realise he needs to learn how to read later on. Because if he doesn’t want to put the effort into hiragana, it’s just not going to happen.
He’s into both karate and anime already. The issue is that he is also interested in manga. Aka, he needs to be able to read.
Because if he doesn’t want to put the effort into hiragana, it’s just not going to happen.
That’s what I think too. However, he’s also interested in manga. If he can’t read basic kana, he’s sorta walled off from that entirely.
tbh, I struggled and took time in the beginning too. Particularly, ability to recognize individual Kana took a few months. I wrote repeatedly, row by row.
But to be exact about the inability to read, there are multiple steps to possibly stuck at.
Individual Kana quiz may be learned by repeating each row over and over. Or use mnemonics, such as Tofugu’s. But imo, this step doesn’t need to be perfected before proceeding to the next.
The next step is reading a series of Kana, that is, sentences. Myself, rather than always trying to read every Kana every time, I’d rather sync with audio / sentence meaning.
Anyway, for both steps, it may be important to take time, meaning months. First step may take just like days for persons with good memory / good memory tricks, but I was not.
Maybe try an app/game, something that’s easy/fun to engage with versus a study sheet?
That was the first thing I tried. 
Hah, I wondered. Isn’t most noteworthy manga translated these days? Given that it would be years before he’s able to read something on the level he probably wants to read, and given the capricious nature of kids at that age, it seems like a pretty tall order at age 11 IMO.
I totally agree. I’m just trying to get him to be able to read basic kana. I’m assuming what he does currently is read manga in English. I’m honestly not sure he really understands what “learning Japanese” entails, since his initial spark in wanting to learn was from a random summer camp that anyone can create a class and teach. Aka, his first exposure wasn’t from someone who even knew Japanese themselves, and his exposure was all English.
If he has access to a PC, you could recommend him the Steam Game “Learn Japanese To Survive! Hiragana Battle”. It put’s him into an RPG world where the monsters are Hiragana Characters and you have to choose the correct reading to beat them in battle. It’s a fun and playful way to get in the repitition needed for recognizing the characters 
Maybe you need to take a step back and ask different questions.
How much is he reading in general?
Reading in itself is not an automatically simple task. It trains your brain to recognize words in totally different way. It is important to read things in general. At his age, I bet he would say he reads all the time on social media, but I am not sure that counts. Those sources are for people with short attention span. Reading books or longer articles also teaches patience and focus.
What is his motivation?
When I was young, I wanted to know so much just because someone else knew it. That is common motivation for children, but with little understanding of the workload behind it, only the most dedicated ones get anywhere. They sort of expect others to push them because they don’t really understand learning.
Does he know how to learn?
Learning is a skill. It is not enough to just repeat lessons ad nauseam and expect results. An adult would figure out for themselves what makes them learn. With a lot of practice, a lesson can easily by 10 times more effective if you know how you work internally. This is the true reason children go to school. Not to learn 5+5, but to exercise learning. Role of a tutor is to help him learn how he learns.
Set clear goals and limits.
So where to start? You need to be a little pushy and make sure he works for it. Make sure he uses the resources you gave him. Give him excercises, even small ones. Tell him to learn something on his own each time and tell you about it, not necessarily about Japanese. And if he doesn’t do it, don’t be affraid to tell him your lessons are over. You are not responsible for his slacking. If that sounds just like school, than bingo, because it is. He asked you for more school after all.
In general I always found doing just a few at a time with really easy mnemonics (so many picture mnemonics already exist online), creating a list of words and short sentences and even grammar concepts that be learned with those very few hiragana, and slowly adding hiragana week by week works. Over the years I’ve probably taught hiragana to close to 100 kids 12-17ish.
That said, I’ve also been a language teacher (not Japanese) at the college level for a number of years now. Every now and then there is a student who is dedicated to learning, puts in the time, is generally bright in their other classes, and just can’t learn even the basics. Maybe there is some special learning method I am missing in my educational toolbox; honestly there probably is, but there are some kids who really just don’t pick up language naturally at all.
If you’ve tried taking it slow, done lots of reading practice with just the first few hiragana you’ve learned, and tried to use mnemonics to remember the hiragana, but it still just isn’t working, maybe it just won’t… and maybe that’s okay?
Not sure if this would help, but in my first Japanese class, we started with katakana. Katakana letterforms are simpler to write, and you can use them to read and write things like names and loan words that don’t require any Japanese knowledge. Then, when we moved on to hiragana, we already had a decent understanding of how Japanese sounds map to symbols, and we “only” had to learn another set of letterforms.