How did you learn Hiragana?

[Akya]

I learnt it in middle school and we basically had to learn it by writing it out over and over again and wr had tests to fill out the Hiragana sheet.

[linguaholic]

I studied Hiragana with iPhone Apps and some textbooks. It was pretty easy to study it with just a handful of free apps. It is useful to write down the characters while studying them "on a screen" as writing down characters is most crucial for remembering them at a later point (also how to write them of course).

[Czarownica]

I've learnt hiragana from "Remembering the Kana", a book recommended to me by my roommate. I keep advertising it on this forum, but it really is quite good

When I went to college we got some practice sheets that our teacher would later check.

[linguaholic]

I like that book as well czarownica, as well as all the other books be J.W Heisig. (Remebering the Kanji & Remembering the Hanzi).

Have you seen my PM Czarownica? :=)  :shy:

[Czarownica]

I like that book as well czarownica, as well as all the other books be J.W Heisig. (Remebering the Kanji & Remembering the Hanzi).

Have you seen my PM Czarownica? :=)  :shy:

I don't like Remembering the Kanji nearly as much, to be honest. It's good for mnemonics, I guess, but as a kanji textbook it's just not sufficient - it has no readings, stroke order or example compounds.

No, I haven't seen your PM, actually. You sure you sent it? Because I don't see any new PMs at all

[mccanono]

I am currently learning (and memorizing) Hiragana through the help of a doctor.

Doctor Moku haha  :grin:

http://drmoku.com/

So basically, it's an app for iOS and Android devices that teaches you how to learn Hiragana and Katakana easily by using mnemonics. And the examples were good so right now, I am still trying to memorize each character and how they are being written.

(it's taking a little while for me to memorize all of them because I am busy with other things, not enough time   )

[Dame6089]

I had a book that taught you all of the strokes for each character. After practicing a few times, I would write the character on a flash card to use later. It really is just repetition. See it enough and you will eventually lock it in your memory.

[BWL]

Hiragana and katakana weren't the problems for me, it was learning kanji that gave me headaches! I often had difficulty learning the various readings and pronunciations which, in Chinese have only one pronunciation. in Japanese, if you combine certain characters together or if you add hiragana to them, the pronunciations and meanings may change drastically.

[davidbankson]

I have been learning hiragana using Rosetta Stone. It's not my primary method of learning Japanese, but it's definitely been useful for vocabulary and hiragana. I honestly haven't even looked into learning it any other way, mostly because I'm more focused on speaking and understanding at this point. It surprises me how quickly I do pick up the characters, though.

[j_evemstar]

I self-studied Japanese for a year, this includes Hiragana. Perhaps that's the reason why my Japanese handwriting is bad.  :bored:

[Lasonax]

I used the book "Remembering the Kana" aswell as Anki, it worked like a charm - and it didn't take very long!

I could have gone through everything much faster than I did, but unfortunately I didn't have much spare time every day.

[iyashiokami]

I learned in a classroom setting, but the exercises which helped me the most involved writing complete sentences.  After seeing and writing complete words with context enough times, I could eventually see the sound instead of the strokes.

Of course, tons of studying and memorization also helps. 

[Miya]

I learned Hiragana when I took my first Japanese class. However, hiragana is simple enough to learn by itself. If you don't have the time to take a class, just look on the internet and you can easily learn hiragana by yourself.

[ang.diwata]

I learned hiragana and katakana by downloading loads of practice sheets from several websites offering free downloads of japanese-related resources. I also downloaded hiragana and katakana chart from the web, and pinned it in my wall, so I could see it everyday, and be able to memorize it faster.

[OddVisions]

Huh! I can't believe that this thread hasn't been posted in for as long as it has. Well, to answer the question, I started learning hiragana through various phone applications as well as memory games. Basically, I would write the sound alphabet for hiragana in romajii then see how many 'letters' in the hiragana script I could draw under the sound alphabet.

[AExAVF]

Since my formal basic Nihongo class started last week, we were introduced to writing hiragana.  The basic vowels are quite tricky, but once you get the hang of it, it is already easy.  Speaking and memorization is not so difficult, but writing it can be quite complicated.  You have to make sure that the strokes are perfect.

[petrushka]

I learned it through... Wikipedia. Haha! I'm sure there are better, easier places to learn it from but that's where I learned to memorize the hiragana alphabet because it was complete and they even included the characters that are nearly obsolete these days.

What I did was to save the character in my computer and it sort of became like a flashcard type thing where I would say out loud what I thought the character was and then I checked if I was right after. Paying for classes was too expensive and when I started, I had no smartphone to download apps to get that flashcard effect so that was what I did. I also practiced writing the characters on scratch paper to make sure I remembered what they looked like but I had to unlearn that because I wasn't following the correct stroke order, haha!

Reminiscing about this is certainly nostalgic but I'm glad I worked so hard then since it did stick with me.

[kmb]

Right now I'm just learning it through repetition. Mnemonics help me a lot, and developing those associations through linking it to something else - I plan on making some flash cards from a resource I found on here. I think it'll help a lot with remembering.

[rilakkumasenpai]

I started learning in in high school too, in 9th grade.  Though since I had already gotten some Japanese related gifts from family and friends about 2 years before taking 9th grade, I started trying to write hiragana very early, not even knowing about the stroke order and what it meant.   Learning hiragana came really easy to me, it's Katakana I still have trouble with.

[Cave Bear]

I learned hiragana with Memrise, and I use the Obenkyo app as a daily refresher as I'm riding the bus to work.

[宇崎ちゃん]

I used this DS Homebrew application to learn hiragana and katakana back in 2008.
It's a shame I can't find anything similar to other alphabets, because Project JDS actually served me very well.
So in 2015, I decided to make my own version for other alphabets.

Give my application a try. It's free and super easy to use!

[capuchin]

I memorized Hiragana by writing it over and over again. I created mnemonics for some like the hiragana for "no" sort of looks like an "o" and an "n" combined in one character.

[waynelam8]

Apps can definitely help you memorize hiragana and  katagana

[BWL]

I had learned to read basic Chinese before hiragana, so after finding out that hiragana was invented over a thousand years ago by simplifying cursive Chinese characters, I just used their source characters as mnemonic devices. For example:

あ (a) was derived from the kanji 安 ('an' in Mandarin as well as in Japanese onyomi).

い (i) was derived from the kanji 以 ('yi' in Mandarin)

か (ka) was derived from the kanji 加 (pronounced 'jia' in Mandarin, but 'ka' in Fujianese, my native dialect) etc, etc

It was the highly stylised and squarish katakana that I had problems distinguishing when I first started studying Japanese rather than hiragana

[cheers100]

On Thu Dec 17 2015 20:26:17 GMT+0800, BWL said:

I had learned to read basic Chinese before hiragana, so after finding out that hiragana was invented over a thousand years ago by simplifying cursive Chinese characters, I just used their source characters as mnemonic devices. For example:

あ (a) was derived from the kanji 安 ('an' in Mandarin as well as in Japanese onyomi).

い (i) was derived from the kanji 以 ('yi' in Mandarin)

か (ka) was derived from the kanji 加 (pronounced 'jia' in Mandarin, but 'ka' in Fujianese, my native dialect) etc, etc

It was the highly stylised and squarish katakana that I had problems distinguishing when I first started studying Japanese rather than hiragana

I agreed. I learnt those hiragana many many years ago, and I remembered those hiragana almost without any effort.  I quitted learning Japanese. And they just log into my memory, and I never forget them so far.

And oddly, I learnt Persian alphabet, and words just last year, and later I had a traffic accident, and I forgot almost all of them.