Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each Bilingual Edition

I love studying languages, I ordered this book and the sister book Remembering the Kanji to get started with my study of Japanese. I have learned many writing systems throughout the years, it’s a little corny at times, but this has got to be the fastest, most direct way to learn Hiragana and Katakana! Well worth the price!

What the book promises: to teach you hiragana and katakana in 3 hours each. Not pronunciation, not vocabulary, but how to recognize and write the symbols. It does.The book delivers on this by using tried-and-true learning methods to get you to think about each symbol and to link the symbol to specific active visual images. It is entirely possible that this method might not work well for an auditory or kinesthetic learner, but if you are a visual learner then this method should work well for you. Occasionally I would hit cases where his imagery felt strained to me, but after a bit of careful consideration I had my own active images that resonated better with me and gave me strong mental hooks to use. For example, he extends the imagery for the character "Ha" to the character "Ho," while I found the "Ma" character to be a more-relatable base from which to build "Ho." Either way, it works, and I can now remember and reproduce all three characters consistently.I've seen some complaints about the fact that the book has you jumping back and forth among the pages rather than going in sequence. I have not found this to be anything more than a very mild distraction, and I understand why the author did it this way: he even states that he put the kana in the book in dictionary order rather than in the order he teaches them so that once you know the dictionary order you can look up a specific kana later if you need to check something about it. And yes, he does also teach you the dictionary order as well. (Of course, I might never get the song, "Frere Jacques" back out of my head now!)I'm using this in tandem with Rosetta Stone's Japanese Language program to help me learn the kana as I'm learning the language. I also have Heisig's Kanji books and will move on to them later. I fully expect them to be as useful and effective as this one has been.

I bought this book already knowing most of the hiragana (just blanking on a few here and there) yet having trouble with a good number of the katakana due to their similarities with each other. Now I have a way to keep them straight. One of the later katakana chapters covers a set of katakana that can be very problematic to the beginner for this reason, but gives you helpful keywords to remember them.A piece of advice to future buyers: When you're first learning how to do so, take your time writing the kana. If you rush the writing, it will be sloppy, especially for particularly complex kana (the hiragana A and the katakana NE gave me problems). My handwriting in English is better than some I've seen from people my age and older, but is still sloppy enough to require getting used to. That's what I get for writing quickly, I guess ;)

Great book. The technique that it teaches with is great for beginners. For a couple of the characters I used different stories because I couldn't draw the same mental image that the author was depicting (a little too random), but most were good. I realized that even though I haven't practiced in over 6 months I still remember most of the characters using the memory tools! I just wish the Kanji were so easy..

I was looking for a starting place and this has been essential to get statred. Highly suggest if you're serious to learn Japanese.

The non-linear 'adventure' type layout was unexpected but I like it. Kinda reminds me of those old 'choose your path' type books I read when I was little. The little stories and memory tips are useful- some more so than others but for the most part, they do a good job of sticking an image in your mind. One problem I personally have with both learning Chinese and Japanese was associating a sound with the character and the meaning. With English and many other Romance languages such as Spanish, you can just look at the word and get the pronunciation. Since this doesn't work without Romanized characters, the memory stories really help create that connection. I also liked some of the little features like how they included different fonts/typesets for the Kana at the bottom of the page- really helpful if you want to take your knowledge and apply it to street signs, advertisements, product packaging, websites, manga, etc.As a supplement, I'd recommend getting the free flashcard app 'Anki' for your computer or phone. People have already made flashcard decks for this book (and plenty of other Japanese flash card sets as well) for you to download. At least for me, I really need a lot of review and constant memory jogging in order to keep all my Kana fresh so I'd highly recommend that (which is in no way affiliated with the book or me).

Gostei

DO NOT BUY THE KINDLE VERSION!!! Actually, this version should be removed from the store, because it doesn't work AT ALL!Hyperlinks are bugged, pages are totally screwed and it seems they will never fix it, once that a review from 2015 says the same thing.

Auch von meiner Seite aus: kauft euch nicht die Kindle Version. Sehr viele leere Seiten und für nur ein Zeichen muss man ewig blättern weil alles zerschossen ist. Es gab vor der Herausgabe keine Qualitätskontrolle. Der Inhalt selbst ist super aber mit der Kindle Version kann man einfach schlicht und weg nicht gut arbeiten.Es frustriert wirklich.Hier kann man nur zur gedruckten Version raten.

In a word, this book is about mnemonics. That is, coming up with small stories for every hiragana and katakana character to make remembering them a simple task. For example, あ (the hiragana character pronounced "a") is described like an "o"tter (the Japanese "a" is pronounced like the "o" in "otter") throwing some daggers (the +) at a "no parking sign" (the hiragana の in the lower part of this character is pronounced "no").Especially for the hiragana, this works exceptionally well, as Heisig's stories incorporate the small characters that constitute more complicated hiragana into the stories. The katakana were harder for me to memorize- as they're block characters drawn in fewer strokes, there's less room for crafting small stories to describe katakana characters. This is reflected in the stories, as the descriptions for the katakana were generally not so imaginative. However, they were still reasonably easy to learn thanks to how the book shows you the kanji every character is derived from, sample words and their readings, the stroke order, etc.I believe a PDF of the first "lesson" (there are 6 lessons per syllabary so 12 total) is available online I think.Overall this was an excellent way to learn the kana for me! Didn't have to supplant it with anything else, but I used Duolingo to revise the hiragana in any case.

Metodo intetesante para aprender Kana