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Linguaholic

Distinguishing ツ and シ, as well as ソ and ン


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I've had this trouble since I started learning Japanese, and I saw some other members said they have the same problem too. I can remember which is which, but everytime they appear in a sentence I'll get confused and have to reread a few times to get the character right. It is harder when the sentence is handwritten too. Does anyone have tips on how to recognize the difference right away, and making it stick to memory?

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Write or type words using these letters every day.
Don't overdue it, that'd be rote memorisation and that's bad.
Instead, write some words once every 4 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 4 days, etc. and pronounce those in your head while writing or typing.

Although I found these 4 letters the easiest to learn, I can understand the confusion.
シ and ツ look as similar to each other as f and t look similar.
But as with Latin letters, the more you practise, the better you'll distinguish them.

As a little help:
リーズ - shiriizu (series)
レッゴー - rettsu goo (let's go)
サタ - satan
ート - risooto (resort)

Edited by Blaveloper
Typo.
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Ohh thank you for the tips! I've been focusing too much on writing kanji that I forgot I should practise katakana too. o: Also I found remembering ツ is easier since it appears a lot as the small ツ in words like レッ ツ . I think I'll try focusing on just ツ and ン since I remember one of my teachers used to say "just remember one, so you won't get confused." It was a tip for memorizing which mathematical formula to use to solve a chemistry problem, but I think it will help for something like this too haha.

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I remember having this problem when I first started learning Japanese. It's confusing and there's no reason for those characters to look so much alike XD

If you look really carefully, you'll see the difference though. The long line for シ (shi) and ン (n) goes from bottom up so it's slightly more slanted.  The long line for ツ (tsu) and  ソ (so) goes from top to bottom so it's slightly more curved. 

Hope that helps.

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