JapanNewbie

How to learn to write Japanese Hiragana

Posted on 03. Oct, 2009 @ 12:15 pm by harvey in Language Views: 533

Here’s a video from HowToWriteInJapanese.blogspot.com. Of course, there are many ways to learn Hiragana, and this is just one of them. I like the idea of saying the hiragana as you write them to connect the visual, the action of writing, and the sound all in your head.

Of course, it takes sheer force of will to actually do this… and to be honest when I was learning hiragana and katakana in high school I didn’t. Then again, I had a teacher going around the room calling on us to read passages out loud as well. So if you are studying on your own and don’t have the pressure of being potentially embarrassed in front of all your classmates, maybe you should give this method a try.

This video is a Singaporean production. Love the accent! On a side note, my ramblings on twitter have lead me to notice that there are a lot of South East Asians studying Japanese. Malaysians, Indonesians, Singaporeans, Thais… and lots of them. It makes sense, Japan being the nearest powerful economy, and the vast majority of Monbusho Fellowship recipients seem to be from that region as well, but videos like this and live interaction on Twitter really bring that reality home.

Once you have learned to write all the hiragana characters you can use something like our Hiragana iPod Touch or iPhone application to check whether you can properly recognize the characters after hearing them spoken.

The video claims that you can learn all the Hiragana in just 9 days if you use this method. And if you really do this method, you really can learn them in that amount of time. Most universities will not spend a lot of time on Hiragana and Katakana, I would venture to say 2-3 weeks max.

The app quiz will play the audio of a random character and have you pick the correct Hiragana from a random line up of options.

Give it a try! We also have a similar app for Katakana available.

Happy ひらがなing!

Harvey