There are over 3,794,714 million people learning Japanese according to the lastest survey taken by the japan foundation. So it’s no surprise that many people want to learn how to learn hiragana fast.
Especially with the rise of anime and Japanese traditions, who wouldn’t want to be apart of such a diverse and amazing culture.
In my quest to learning several languages I have searched and tested various methods to create a system to learn languages fast, fun, and effectively. In this article I will go over my process for building the foundations of the Japanese language and mastering the characters of hiragana and katakana.
I will break this down into 4 simple steps that you can follow along with. I’ll even include resources that you can download and use for a better learning experience.
This is what I found to be the most effective and simple process to track, measure, and visually see your progress in learning a language, especially in a difficult language such as Japanese.
So if your ready to get started let’s begin.
The 4 Steps To Learn Hiragana Fast
the 4 steps are simple:
- Get Familiar with The Characters
- Test Yourself with Flashcards
- Reinforce Memory Through Repetition
- Master Recall with Timed Test
1. Get Familiar with The Characters
Approximate work time: 1 hour.
Before we can begin learning hiragana we need to get to know the characters and how they sound.
Materials needed:
- A notebook or piece of paper
- A pencil or pen
- A hiragana video
To get started here is the video for an introduction to the first set of hiragana characters you need to know
The first thing you’re going to do when watching the video is copy and repeat.
So as he says and writes the characters you are going to follow along and say it out loud and write them down.
You will do this for the next 46 characters.
What you should have on your paper for each character is the character and romanized word for each character (example below).
Once completed, you are going to repeat this 3 times.
So when you’re finished your should have 3 sets (or sheets) of the characters written down like the example below.
Doing this you will have given yourself a good introduction of the hiragana characters and have begun to familiarize yourself with the pattern of the characters, how they look, and how they sound.
After completing this introduction exercise 3 times you are now ready to move on to the next exercise…
The Test
2. Test Yourself with Flashcards
Approximate work time: 30-45min.
It’s now time to see what you remember.
This test will enable your ability to recall the characters and see which ones really stuck out to you. It will make it easier to isolate the ones that gave you trouble and see how much you really learned from your initial introduction
What you will need:
- Flashcards: Anki deck or LL app
- Notebook or piece of paper
If you have Anki or would prefer to use Anki, you can download the pre-made deck [download link] we created and test yourself with that.
If you don’t have Anki you can download it here 👈
After you downloaded the deck you are going to test yourself
Go through the flashcards (not timing yourself), and for each character you are going to try and recognize each of the 46 characters.
For each character you will write them down in 1 of 2 categories [lists]…
- A whitelist [known characters] or
- A blacklist [unknown characters)]
The whitelist will consists of the hiragana characters you remember easily [or you knew it but you might have mixed it with another similar character].
The blacklist consists of the characters you don’t remember at all.
You are going to do this 3 times like the first exercise.
After you have tested yourself 3 times you will use your last test as your indicator of the characters you recognize the most.
You should have something that resembles the example below
The top section is the whitelist and the separated bottom section is the blacklist
This is what we will use in our next exercise to reinforce our memory of the characters that stuck with us.
3. Reinforce Memory Through Repetition
Approximate work time: 30min.
Now that you have your list separated into 2 lists it is now time to practice through repetition.
What your going to do through this exercise is for each character on your whitelist you are going to write it 5x for each character.
When you finish writing all the characters 5 times from your whitelist your going to repeat that 3 times.
So when your finished you should have 3 pages of all the characters you got right written 5 times.
For an example your page should look something like the image below
Do This 3X
4. Master Recall with Timed Test
After you have completed your written repetition exercise it is time for the timed test.
This test will help you gauge your ability how fast you can recall and remember which characters are which.
At first your time is going to be high – because it’s still all new.
The ultimate goal is to get these characters to automaticity (remembering them automatically) and your goal time will be 23 seconds for all 46 characters.
That’s 1/2 a second for each character.
While taking these tests your going to keep track of your progress in order to see visually how you are improving in learning the hiragana characters.
We created a VPS (Visual Progress Sheet) for this exercise which you can download here.
It will track your time every test round.