User blog:JoshuaJSlone/Hiragana and Katakana

A recommendation for others out there who haven't already: Learn hiragana and katakana.

Much of my entertainment taste leans Japanese, and I've even got a site that compiles Japanese game sales, but I never took the time to try to learn how to read any of it. But I guess I finally got pretty sick of always having to depend on machine translations/transliterations, trying to match data by keeping things in mind like "the short chunk of text that starts with a bent 7 and ends with a one-eyed smiley face", and being completely at a dead end when faced with text that's part of a graphic.

But really the main reason I recommend it is because it might be a lot easier than you think. I just assumed that learning another alphabet (or two) would be more trouble than it was worth, but by learning mnemonics for just a few characters each day and reviewing them until familiar, I've got things pretty much down less than a month later. Of course my speed leaves something to be desired, I still have some trouble distinguishing some character differences at small sizes (especially with the extra marks like ぼ vs ぽ), and the existence of kanji means there's still a lot of gaps in what I can read. But it's all very rewarding when I can see text on a video and tell that it says "Natsumi", or tell that a S/mileage image I've run across is for their first single since I can see it starts with characters for a and ma. I wish I'd done this a long time ago.

I'm sure there are alternate resources just as good, but I used my Kindle so I could do this in off moments at work. Hiragana, the Basics of Japanese with Kana Learning Tool for practice, followed later by Katakana, the Basics of Japanese from the same authors as the first book. Pre-tax cost to me for the lot of these, about $10US.