I realize that my notes on the Hiragana and Katakana wont really be useful for other people, they're much like some of my other self serving posts that are just for me, but once I get past this my notes should become useful for other people. For now, me posting here is a way to hold myself accountable for covering material. Each week I review what I've done and it reminds me what pieces I need to review and which things I need to reprioritize.

Status

I've been drilling the Katakana chart content from the A line to the T line. I haven't been able to get a firm enough hold of the T line to make it further. I'm beginning to wonder if my problem with memorizing the Katakana chart is because I've just created all these new associations with hiragana to essentially the same thing. Instead of it providing extra pathways to the data it's acting as interference. I've been writing out the Hiragana and the Katakana, both.

In accordance with advice from @whatamidoing I've been trying to do more in-context practice instead of just drilling the characters. This has lead to an interesting problem. Well, not really a problem, but let's call it an issue. When I write out a phrase like わたしわひとです I have no problem at all writing the Kana, it's quick, fluid, and doesn't require much effort. But if I just try to remember で on it's own, it takes me several moments longer.

There's an Android game that I've been playing with some degree of success, but it only drills single characters (so far?) It's called Kanji no Owari.

Notes

アｲゥェォ - Covered in the previous update, very solid on this one.

力キクケコ - Covered in the previous update, very solid on this one now.

サシスセソ

サ - sa - I have a terrible time with this one. Looks nothing like the hiragana, and I mix it up with せ all the time. I really need a mnemonic for this one. I'm fine writing it and holding it in my short term memory, but by the next day I can't remember what it looked like.

シ - shi (xi) - I was fine with this one until I hit the T line, then I had to go back and look more carefully. Now I remember it as the cold stale breath of the grim reaper. The sound is like death, and the "dots" are like the Chinese radical for ice or water. It also looks like a goofy grin, but it's important to point out that the eyes are one on top of each other if you think of it as a smile.

ス - su - I'm fine with this one. If I can't remember it for some reason, then I can always recall that it looks like 入 (input) which sounds like ru. In this font it doesn't look as similar, but there are fonts where they're harder to distinguish from each other.

セ - se - This one looks like the chinese character for seven (七) with the addition of a little hook. So this gives me both a sound and appearance mnemonic.

ソ - so - I have a really lame mnemonic because this looks like ノ from the N line, which is no. My mnemonic: It's not no, so it must be so.

夕チツテ卜

夕 - ta - I'm better than 50/50 with this one. I don't really have a mnemonic, but it looks like the top of 多 in one font and like the bottom of 发 in others. I'm going to assume it looks closer to the former and call it good for now.

チ - ti - This looks like part of a 天 which is convenient because they both sound like ti at the beginning.

ツ - tsu - And here was my first real problem. The difference between this and シ was hard for me to spot at first. Especially with some fonts! The ツ is like a smiley face with the eyes next to each other, with no vertical overlap in the eyes. And シ is like a smile wher the eyes are actually stacked on top of eachother.

テ - te - I got nothing. It looks like a t, so I know it's the T line, then I figure out which one it is based on the process of elimination. Eventually I wont need to keep doing this mental lookup.

卜 - to - This is like the missing but complementary piece to と, it's the weird object against which the toe was stubbed. I don't have any trouble remembering this one.

Plans

I'm hoping that when I get more time to practice it I'll be able to solidify it better. This weekend is was the monster hunter beta again, so I'm hoping to get a chance to see more Katakana in context. Unfortunately I haven't actually had a large enough block of uninterrupted time to do so. Instead I've been hacking on other projects, some for Utopian. Turns out I only had about half an hour of uninterrupted play with the language set to Japanese. I was able to sound out quite a bit of stuff and type it into a translator, which then gave me nonsensical replies. I should have just used one of the Monster Hunter wikis.

Because it feels like I'm falling behind in my personal goal, I'm going to make a more concerted effort to practice the charts a few minutes in the morning and a few minutes in the evening. Then midway through the week I'm going to add practicing the words and phrases from the beginning of the Genki book. By next week I'll be doing more grammar and vocabulary.

I'm also going to incorporate bits from the 80/20 Japanese book, because I have it in a convenient ebook format, so I can read that while waiting for stuff when I'm neither at home nor work. (Checkout line, waiting rooms, etc).

Feedback

I'm making these notes as I read the text book. If you spot any mistakes, please leave a comment. Even if the seven day window for editing has closed.

References:

• Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese I, Second Edition, 2011.

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Previous Post(s) in the Series:

• 004 - Learning Japanese - Katakana Notes
• 003 Learning Japanese - Hiragana Notes
• 002 Learning Japanese - Hiragana Practice
• 001 Learning Japanese - Hiragana
• I think I'll learn Japanese