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Linguaholic

Mnemonics for Hiragana


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Has anyone used mnemonics to learn Hiragana? Mnemonics are a great memory technique for learning and remembering new information with minimal effort. They generally involve taking easily-forgotten bits of informations and matching them up with something funny and memorable—an image, a rhyme, a sentence. In algebra, for example, I was taught to remember the sentence, "Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally," where the first letter of each word corresponds to the order of operation.

Here's a link to Hiragana mnemonics. These aren't the exact images I used, since the site I learned from seems to be offline, but I think it'll do. There are plenty of similar sites, so if these images aren't helping, a quick google for "hiragana mnemonics" will provide alternate options. Coming up with your own images is even better, so I hear. If you can study these for an hour or so a day, I think you'll have little trouble learning and remembering all the characters within a week.

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A nail in a toe? How did that get there? I'm sure I'd probably say something other than simply "Ouch!" if that happened.

These are pretty interesting. My personal experience is that kana aren't that hard at all to learn for reading. However, these mnemonics may very well help someone remember the differences between similar hiragana, because there are a few of those. They also look helpful for writing, to some degree.

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Eh, for me remembering mnemonics takes more time than remembering that thing that I'm learning :D I'm pretty sure my favorite kana learning book ever, Remembering the Kana had some mnemonics in it.

The mnemonics you linked are quite cute, but I guess I'm lacking imagination, because I have a hard time seeing hiragana shapes there :P

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I agree with Czarownica. The shapes are cute and a hilarious but really take quite a bit of effort to remember!

Remembering the Kana does have some great tips and mnemonics to help learn and memorize kana.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 7 months later...

Things like these can be quite good for Kanji/Katakana/more complex characters, but for simple stuff as the Hiragana I find it to be mostly wasted time. You're better off just "bashing it in" via Anki/Flashcards if you ask me

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Things like these can be quite good for Kanji/Katakana/more complex characters, but for simple stuff as the Hiragana I find it to be mostly wasted time. You're better off just "bashing it in" via Anki/Flashcards if you ask me

I definitely agree, Lasonax. If you are serious about studying Japanese, learning Hiragana should be a piece of cake and you should have enough motivation to just learn them by heart without help of mnemonics. :wacky:

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  • 3 months later...

I use Mnemonics too, they speed up a lot the learning curve, weirder the image or association(word, music, etc) easier to remember :)

The ones I use are from the free app Memrise

Android apk https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.memrise.android.memrisecompanion&hl=en

site: http://www.memrise.com/

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  • 2 months later...

I don't think I've ever had the need for Mnemonics when it comes to Hiragana or Katakana. However, I've had to use it alot when it came to learning the more simplistic of Kanji; especially the ones that looked like Hiragana or Katakana except for an extra line stroke or two.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I just came from my first day of elementary Nihongo, and we were introduced to hiragana.  Since I'm still a beginner, I'm finding it difficult to practice writing.  Speaking is all right but I should memorize the sounds as we will have a quiz next meeting. 

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  • 8 months later...

I know this thread is a little old, but I just wanted to thank you for posting this. I'd been looking for a similar type resource, to try and make associations like that between hiragana and other English words so I could have that sort of link.

I'm going to see about printing it out and turning them into little flash cards.

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