Kana Mnemonics

So you've started on the kanji and chosen an SRS program. It's very important to start this early on as you've got 3000 to get through! Wouldn't you just kick yourself a few months down the line if you could speak Japanese passably, but couldn't read a word of it? Spend an hour a day, learn 15 new kanji, practice the learned ones with your SRS, and you could be reading AND speaking instead.

Now I must stress that this shouldn't be a chore or you'll find motivation hard to come by. Get engaged in creating stories, visualise particularly funny ones and you'll amuse yourself in the process as well as making the kanji easier to remember. As for the number, I personally find that 15 is a comfortable number to learn without forgetting too many or getting overwhelmed with reviews. Do however many you can without getting bored, but do at least one!

On to the actual post. What you'll want to do next, or in tandem with the kanji is learning to read the two phonetic Japanese alphabets: Hiragana and Katakana. Why do we want to learn these? Here's a few reasons:

• You will want to know how to pronounce those kanji you're learning sooner or later right? Hiragana is used for giving pronounciations of kanji as well as things like grammar particles and verb endings.
  
  
• Knowing the sounds available to a Japanese speaker makes it easier to identify a spoken word and look it up in a dictionary. e.g. If a Japanese speaker bid you good morning (ohayou gozaimasu), you might assume it was spelled oh-hi-yo because that's how you'd spell it in English right? With some experience of kana, you'd later recognise it's actually ohayou and you'd have a lot easier time finding it in the dictionary.
  
  
• Katakana is used for borrowed foreign words. Computer jargon for example would be written in katakana. Many words are borrowed from English and are quite similar to their English pronunciations. So if you can read katakana, you'd be able to read and understand a lot of words straight off the bat. Examples include: ビイル　and ジュウス, beer (biiru) and juice (juusu) respectively.
  

Now, on to the how. If you've done a few kanji already you'll start to appreciate how much stories help you remember these foreign looking symbols. You'll want to do something similar but a lot simpler with the kana. I'm talking about kana mnemonics. Instead of creating an involved story, we'll try to think of something that the kana looks like, that will remind us of the sound.

Here's a very simple example:

This is the hiragana for ki (pronounced key) き

Zoom in if you need to, but wouldn't you say that looks like a key? Draw it on a piece of paper and embellish it if you like to make a more realistic key. The idea being that the next time you see that character you think: 'Hey that looks like a key. Oh yes that's pronounced key!'

You can easily master both alphabets in a very short time using this method. Be sure to practice writing them and review them with your SRS to make them stick permanently.

Don't despair, I'm not going to leave you to come up with your own mnemonics! It is best if you do as you'll remember them much better, but to get your imagination kick-started, check out this site. Learn the Kana has stroke order diagrams, mnemonics AND audio of the pronunciation of every kana, so it's an invaluable resource. Be sure to check out the articles on extra characters and similar kana as well.