Learning to Read & Write Kana in Two Weeks

Last year, I took a very wonderful and serendipity-laden trip to Japan, which I’ve somehow managed to not yet finish a blog post on. Well, here’s one little piece of that draft that’s spun out into its own beast: the first two weeks of my language journey, which I started around the time we bought flights for the trip.

This post stops two weeks in because everything after that is like an oil mine in the 1800s: rich in resources, and you can only make progress by drilling furiously. There are plenty of books and apps that will teach you grammar, conversation, and kanji (don’t even get me started on how slow that’s going). But they all seem to either throw you headfirst into kana and hope you’ll pick it up by osmosis, or they rely entirely on English romanization as a crutch, which I didn’t want to do. I couldn’t seem to find a good resource for basic phonetic reading and writing, which I knew would also be useful for touristing, so I made one up.

You can definitely visit without learning how to read a damn thing in Japanese, but here are some reasons I found it really useful.

1. Pronunciation. It’s not intuitive how to pronounce romanized words, because English is a patchwork language with pronunciations sprawling all over the place. However, Japanese phonemes are extremely consistent in pronunciation (no long/short vowel ambiguity!). So once I was familiar with the set of phonemes, I could look at English transcriptions of Japanese words and reliably pronounce the syllables so that they were at least mutually intelligible. It also became easier to figure out how to make English loan words intelligible to Japanese speakers.
2. Opportunity. I liked being able to go into locals-only places and order off the Japanese menus (if very clumsily); I got to taste more authentic, homey food at those places, and they were also less pricey than the tourist spots.
3. Amusement. Slight differences from all the little things we’ve internalized as “normal” in our home culture are hilarious. And for the low low price of spending a couple of weeks learning a tiny phonetic writing system, you too can expand your trip to become that weird foreigner giggling to yourself in the back of a convenience store while reading the label on a “chiizu buraku” (cheese block).
4. Free vocab! In big cities, English and Japanese words are often written out side by side, so I could sometimes pick up free kanji translations while waiting for buses.
5. People prefer it when people care. Even though my conversational abilities were truly objectively horrendous and grammatically lacking in almost every way, I had learned some baseline of basic conversational etiquette and I didn’t ask for the foreigner menu. Locals seemed a lot friendlier toward me on immersion days when I was trying to absorb and use more language, versus more touristy days when I forgot to say “please” and probably came off as blunt.
6. Why travel if not to connect authentically with other cultures and expand your world view? Self explanatory.

Kana are the phonetic writing systems for Japanese. They’re relatively small for a syllabary. Since Japanese phonemes are basically a small subset of English phonemes, they’re pretty friendly to English-speaking learners, because you can map each symbol in your head directly to a phoneme you already speak regularly. (By contrast, in tonal languages such as Thai or Mandarin, you need to learn new phonetic distinctions that don’t exist in English.)

Japanese commonly uses three writing systems:

• hiragana — Phonetic writing system for native words. There are 48 base characters, with three phonetic modifiers.
• katakana — Phonetic writing system for foreign loan words (also often used for given names). Conveniently for English-speaking tourists, the vast majority of Japanese loan words are from English. (A moment of silence for one of the tragic historical precedents for this that’s less well known in standard American history curricula: the American firebombings on 20+ major Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of WW2.) Katakana use the exact same phonemes, modifiers, and rules as hiragana, but written with a different character set.
• kanji — Logographic characters borrowed from Chinese, though many meanings have changed over time. You won’t be starting with these unless you already know Chinese, which is a pretty great semantic jumpstart.

It’s also helpful to know about rōmaji, which is when you use the Latin alphabet to write out Japanese pronunciations.

1. Organize your mental map / attack plan

After a couple days of uselessly flopping around on Duolingo, aimlessly confusing characters for each other, I realized I really needed to just download a complete chart and group those hiragana into similar-looking clusters to attack the source of my confusion head-on.

A few groups took on a distinct visual hierarchy where adding a stroke to one kana would create the next one. These clusters were particularly useful in the beginning because I’d see a kana I knew was in the わ・れ・ね group, but not which one it was. If I visually ran down the わ・れ・ね list in my head, I could then pick it out.

There are also a bunch of kana that share similarities, but don’t have such a clear hierarchy of complexity as わ・れ・ね (wa, re, ne) and の・め・ぬ (no, me, nu). These were still useful to group so that I could be aware of their similarities, and more sure not to confuse them with each other.

The more unique-looking hiragana, such as ふ (fu), を (wo), and そ (so), were much easier to pick up because there was no chance of confusing them with another kana.

After much erasing and rearranging on paper, I made a cleaner chart of my final groupings.

2. Recognition

I drilled the clusters until I was at least sure I could distinguish different kana within the context of a cluster, if not in a larger text.

no me nu no me nu no me nu

Once I had a half-decent idea what was going on, I started training visual recognition by erasing the English translations from my chart and filling it in. The first time doing this was extremely demoralizing, and the second somewhat less so!

print this and try it yourself

Contextualization

Learning the kana this way in isolation was frustrating after a couple days because I didn’t feel like I was making progress toward actual reading.

CrunchyNihongo has some great translation exercises for beginners, which I worked through to write out the rōmaji for each sentence. The first sentence was seriously painful, but forcing myself to translate within the context of a sentence was incredibly helpful for visual recognition, especially with some repeated words and suffixes. Ten sentences in, I was only consulting my cheat sheet about half as often.

Mental wiring tip: at first, I was directly translating these one kana at a time into their written Romanized equivalents. But I knew this was inefficient and I eventually wanted to get around the two-phase process of kana -> romanization -> meaning. Once I was more fluent in reading them, I translated out loud instead of on paper, in order to rewire my brain to associate kana directly with sounds instead of with the image of them written out in Roman characters.

You might notice that these kana use modifiers we didn’t cover above. At this point, I had enough kana knowledge bootstrapped that it was less frustrating to hop back and learn those.

3. Modifiers

Two really nice things about kana are the extremely small set of modifiers it uses, and the consistency of its rules.

These two modifiers are used to expand hiragana by 23 more sounds, but the modification rules are so consistent that once you know the base glyphs by heart, you basically get the modified versions for free.

The modifier that looks like a tiny double quotation mark — が、ざ、だ — changes an unvoiced consonant to a voiced consonant (one that vibrates the vocal chords). Say a few of them out loud (ka → ga, sa → za, ta → da) to feel the difference.

The modifier that looks like a little circle — ぱ、ぽ、ぷ — changes a consonant to make a puff of air with your lips. Try it out loud: ha → pa, ho → po, fu → pu.

The next modifier, っ (not to be confused with つ) was a real curveball for me because Duolingo was throwing it in with zero explanation and I hadn’t noticed the visual difference. I finally looked it up.

Whenever a small っ appears before a consonant, it doubles that consonant. Japanese is a moraic language. Each kana represents not just a phoneme, but a mora — a sound that takes up a unit of time. So you can think of っ as a bit of a pause: “nip_on” instead of “nipon”.

To borrow an example from this excellent article on the neurolinguistics of mora, which of these Japanese brand names do you think is longer to pronounce, Toyota or Nissan? An English speaker will say Toyota has three syllables and Nissan has two. A Japanese speaker will notice that Toyota (トヨタ) has three mora, and Nissan (ニッサン) has four. Nissan takes longer to pronounce.

4. Recall

Once I could recognize all the hiragana characters — that is, fill in the whole blank sheet consistently without cheating — I moved on to recall, because I wanted to be able to write too.

I drilled these blank sheets like a pop quiz from hell.

This uses a different set of mental muscles, and the first time was like starting all over again. But it came together faster than first learning to recognize the characters.

Contextualization

As with the hiragana → rōmaji translation exercise, I looked at romanizations of Japanese sentences and translated them into hiragana — first by cheating quite a bit, and eventually without consulting the sheet.

5. Extending hiragana to katakana

Onward to katakana, the writing system for loan words and arguably more useful for English-speaking tourists!

Katakana only took a seventh as much time for me to learn to read and write as hiragana. Only the written characters change, but the phonemes, modifiers, and rules are exactly the same as in hiragana. The organized mental map is the tricky part, and you already have it.

I was deeply annoyed about rewiring my brain yet again when I started katakana, but it makes a lot of sense now. When you skim kana, the system used quickly cues you on how to think about the word — katakana usually stands alone and you need to look in your English word banks instead of your Japanese vocabulary for its meaning.

As with hiragana, I doodled around until I had grouped the katakana into mnemonically-inclined clusters, and wrote their hiragana translations next to them.

Some of them were evocative enough of their hiragana equivalents that I didn’t need to construct a grouping for them. Many grouped together both phonetically and visually — notice the uniquely boxy shapes of コ ko, ロ ro, and ヨ yo, and the inversion of マ ma and ム mu.

Hot tip: this is organized in a way that makes sense for my brain — for best results, do this exercise yourself to find groupings that make sense for your brain.

Not all of the mappings made sense — I found サ (sa) counterintuitive because it looks so much like the hiragana せ (se), so I put that one in a special bucket to drill extra.

Good old no, me, and nu follow the same hierarchy of increasing stroke complexity in both hiragana (の, め, ぬ) and katakana (ノ, メ, ヌ), which was a relief.

As with hiragana, I trained recognition and wrote out romanizations of contextual translations.

And finally, to be able to write in katakana, I trained recall and wrote out contextual translations from rōmaji to katakana.

That’s it!

My favorite beginner learning resources

• Speak Japanese in 90 Days — Despite the clickbaity title, my language understanding progressed far more effectively once I switched from the Genki textbook to this book. The units are ordered very thoughtfully to build upon previous material, and they’re organized in study-session sized chunks. Each new unit introduces just one new grammatical concept, such as a particle or verb conjugation. Very conducive to pairing with flashcards and spaced repetition.
• Tae Kim’s Japanese grammar guide — An amazingly well structured grammar guide that teaches you how to think in Japanese, not just how to parrot sentences or translate English thoughts. Loving this and wish I discovered it earlier. The units are very well organized in study-session sized chunks, with lots of useful comprehension examples, and examples of what makes different grammar “feel” right or wrong and why. My kanji literacy has also increased much less painfully since I started using this book.

Other resources worth mentioning that I haven’t been personally finding useful (but perhaps you will)

• Genki I — A classic textbook introduction to the language; conversational samples use formal grammar patterns and seem to be geared toward exchange student situations. It relies heavily on rōmaji, which is a crutch that I found extremely distracting and annoying the moment I finished learning hiragana. I also wish it provided more kanji.
• Japanese: The Spoken Language — I found some parts of this book handy for a beginner understanding of certain colloquialisms, and it has useful visual charts of different conjugations. Unfortunately, the entire book is in rōmaji and some of the romanizations are nonstandard, so I wouldn’t recommend this as a primary learning source. Mostly, I’m mentioning this book because I found it for free.
• Japanese Kanji Power (JLPT N5 & N4) — You hit a wall pretty fast if you aren’t learning kanji in conjunction with general vocabulary. The introductory section is very well laid out; it has useful groupings and etymologies of kanji radicals to help you discern the semantics of different logograph components.
  However, the book provides little to no sentence context or obvious cohesion between chapters. I found it impossible to make sense of kanji I didn’t already know, or understand when to use 音読み「おにょみ」vs 訓読み 「くにょみ」(different contextual kanji pronunciations). It seems like this book is probably best used as a standardized test review supplement in conjunction with more comprehensive resources.

As a small learning motivator/reward/punishment, I got myself what at first appears to be a lighthearted children’s book, but may in fact be something far more sinister.

サメーズ (Same-zu) is an adorable pastiche of comics about ホオジロ, a great white shark with legs who wants nothing more than to eat his best friend アザラシ, a chubby and delicious seal. While adventuring with other underwater pals, they teach you fun biology factoids (like how anglerfish parasitic mating works), try to trick the seal into getting eaten, and at some point, beat up and rob a guy at a fish market for his prize tuna catch, using…the power of FRIENDSHIP.

Anyway, it’s around my reading level, so I have no complaints.

Enjoy your new life upgrade of learning how to access a vast new wealth of ideas and stories that people who speak a different language have written over their entire cultural history! 頑張って！