Monday 20 June 2011

Learning the kana

Something I have tried several times to find, but have always been successful in doing so is this: full articles or stories, or any writing for that fact, written entirely in hiragana or katakana. Now why would I look for this I might ask? One way I found that works for me to learn new "alphabets" is to translate it either one way or the other. In fact, I once taught myself how to write using bopomofo characters. It wasn't Chinese, but I used the characters that corresponded to the roman letters on this keyboard:
File:Keyboard layout Zhuyin.svg
Of course that was only something silly, and what I'm doing with Japanese is much more serious. But it is the repetition that forces the characters into my head. If I had a full page of hiragana or katakana written out in front of, I would translate it into romaji, then translate the romaji to English. So I'd learn some new words as well, and grammar. You could argue I could do this starting with kanji, but my main focus at this point is definitely on the kana. If anyone reads this and has a page full of kana, please send me in its direction!!

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