I spent a couple of weeks trying to learn the hiragana by rote and failed miserably. It wasn't until I started reading things and looking up the hiragana I came across that I started to remember them. Not allowing myself to use roman characters would probably have had me giving up on that too.

I do not know if any of you have seen the website alljapaneseallthetime, but for me personally his articles on his attitude towards learning Japanese, fighting procrastination, and learning in general genuinely changed the way I think for the better. From what I understand it is a bit of a "love it or hate it" thing, though. Perhaps he overstates things sometimes, but his way of thinking just works for me even if I can't bring myself to that same level of immersion.

The reason to drill kana isn't so much for easy comprehension (although it's the first step for that too) as easy reproduction. It's really easy to get stuck in a rut where you understand something but can't do it yourself. At which point its really too late to drill; it's very painful to drill things you already know.

I have something like that already. But thanks. This one looks a lot nicer than the one I have!

_________________
Slava Ukraini!

What do you mean here?

_________________
Slava Ukraini!

There are two senses in which you can know kana:

1. See kana, spit out word
2. Hear word, spit out kana

For 2, IMHO writing out the kana several dozen or even several hundred times is the only way.

To practice writing kana I practiced writing Japanese (as opposed to just the characters), and looked up the ones I couldn't remember when I needed them. I know a lot of people get good results from rote memorisation but it just doesn't work for me, so while you may be right that it's the best way for most people, it definitely isn't the only way.

Yesterday, I got very little done as I was out most of the day. There was a Block Party in downtown Norfolk, so I went and checked that out. Fun stuff! While there I ate at a restaurant called Sakura Elite. I had teriyaki chicken (a personal favorite), rice, vegetables, and sushi. My brother was also with me.

Later on that evening, I got to watch a film called The Artist. It's a silent film. It was very good, too!

But yesterday wasn't an entire waste. I went to Barnes & Noble and acquired a book containing 2000 necessary Kanji. It has the definitions, stroke order, and a lot of neat information.

So, I made a change in my learning plan (again). Instead of trying to learn all those words, grammar, ect. I'm simply going to focus on learning Hiragana first. After all, the characters are the foundation for words, and words are the foundation for sentence structure. I think it will be a lot easier this way. Of course I'll still try to learn words, but the main point right now is learning Hiragana. I'm going to attempt to learn 10 a day (on days I do not have college, because I'm usually at school from 8am to 9pm). So this could theoretically cut my original 9 week plan into 4 short days. If it doesn't work, so be it, I'll lower the number of Hiragana characters per day. But I'm going to dedicate 4 hours each day on the 10 Hiragana characters. That includes learning the sounds they make and learning how to write them.

Then, once I have mastered Hiragana, I will move on to Katakana.

_________________
Slava Ukraini!

Fair enough. My own experience is that, after several years with little opportunity to practice, I can recognize characters I originally learned in context but never drilled, but I'm generally a bit at a loss when I need to write them. Characters I drilled more than a decade ago and haven't seen since are still pretty easy. It's just that the muscle memory of doing the stroke order correctly sticks with me.

ooh... that's a fun chart!

And it contains the "i ro ha" too. Which, by the way, for go players, you'll find this handy because in many Japanese language tsumego books and old game records, い　ろ　は will be the order of the alternate moves (its like our "alphabetical order", a b c)

I just yesterday started working out of this book (one volume edition called "Remembering the Kana". I did three lessons (with breaks) in about an hour and a half. This morning I review what I did and found that I have 22 of the hiragana memorized. I can read them off the page and produce the characters when thinking of the sound. This is the first time I have spent any time attempting to learn any Japanese. It seems to me that the unique nontraditional approach to this book is very effective in a small amount of time. I have to think for a few seconds for some of the characters, but I haven't forgotten a single one.

The author dissects the characters into basic components and assigns a visual image to each. For each new character introduced, a scene (usually ridiculous and funny)using the images of the character's components is described incorporated a keyword that helps you remember the pronunciation of the character. The keywords make it easy to remember the character from the sound, and the images help to remember the sound from the character.

Highly recommended. Learn by doing problems over and over again, just like tsumego.

Thanks for the tip lemmata!

The past few days have been a bit hectic for my efforts to learn Hiragana. However, I can safely say I've learned a few more characters over the past weekend.

However, I'm trying to get as much exposure as I can to the culture as well (as much as one can get living an ocean away from the target country), so I've started watching a Japanese TV show called Mirai Nikki. Maybe someone's heard of it? I'm halfway through the first episode as of this writing.

And the next major step has been listening to the music. I've listened to all sorts of Japanese music over the years (mostly video game music composers such as Koji Kondo, Yoko Shimomura, and Nobuo Uematsu, my personal favorite), but I've also listened to others like Hikaru Utada. Recently I've been exploring more of the music. It's pretty good, but most of what I've listened to has been pop except for one band that has quickly become one of my favorites. And that band is B'z.

B'z are awesome. My favorite song by them so far is "Don't Wanna Lie."

As I noted on my lang-8 journal, I also discovered the Koto. It's a magnificent instrument. And there was some good stuff to be found on YouTube, but it was fairly limited.

Anyway, the next time I'll update will be next Friday. By then I hope to have learned at least 20 more Hiragana characters (bearing in mind I cannot study too much on Tuesday and Thursday). さようなら！

_________________
Slava Ukraini!

Some points re Romaji and katakana:

Many Japanese wordprocessors take input in the form of Romaji and give you a list of kanji to choose from.

Katakana are indeed used for borrowed foreign words, telegrams, electric billboards, etc., but they are also used for technical words that are not part of the general populace's vocabulary, e.g. go words, scientific words, other specialized words.

As for kanji, I find it much easier to learn them by writing them repeatedly than by looking at them over and over on flash cards.

Writing them again and again has actually been my main method for learning Hiragana so far. I only use the flash cards to randomly test whether or not I know the sound a specific Hiragana makes or to see if I know how to write it if presented with the sound.

It's been a lot easier than I thought it would be, honestly.

_________________
Slava Ukraini!

Is there a way to get a western keyboard to write in kana/kanji without relying in romanji? I have seen hiragana stickers for the keyboard keys for sale on ebay, but have not been able to find a way of typing in Japanese except with Microsoft IME. I have finished learning the hiragana now, and want to write to a Japanese friend of mine, but I don't want to constantly be drumming romanji into my mind whenever I write on the computer. Does anyone know how to do this?

I've been trying to figure this out too since I can't get the IME to work right. However, in the meantime, you could use this: http://www.branah.com/japanese. That's what I've been using.

_________________
Slava Ukraini!

to use a Japanese keyboard, you need to change your keyboard driver from English to Japanese (and I forget where these settings are in Windows). But unless your OS is also in Japanese, you'll probably find it more troublesome to use that way.

The IME is pretty easy to use. Let us know the specific trouble you're having, and maybe someone here can assist.

What operating system? You really should use the IME, a Japanese keyboard will be a huge exercise in frustration.

I Have Windows 7 x64