How do I learn Kana

Seriously, the little fucking drawings are driving me insane.

I'm usually quite good at learning things: I can speak fluently in a second language* I've only been immersed in through the internet and I learn stuff in my field** in a breeze.

 but this hol

*
** computer science of course

HAY HOW DID I FUCK POSTING A NEW THREAD

I too have trouble memorizing kana
what do you guys recommend?

you mean now do I learned Kana

if you have trouble learning the kana then you should give up on japanese right now, because it's seriously nothing compared to kanji and it shouldn't take longer than two days or so

TWO DAYS!?!?

wtf, either you are a genious (or a troll) or I'm retarded

I learned katakana in an hour or so. Hiragana are a little harder though.

>>1
Get a good book. Genki is pretty awesome. There's also a website that rules.
 http://www.coscom.co.jp/cybtext/kana/e-index.html
This is how I learned japanese. Hope that helps

1: Compare and contrast between characters.
2: Work as slow as you need - people who learn kana in an hour will take much time getting used to the characters, so you end up taking the same amount of time either way.
3: If you truly want to learn Japanese, you will find a way. I owe all my achievements in Japanese to my burning wapanese fury.
4: ???
5: PROFIT

http://www.ichigo.se/kanaflash/

I sat there with a pad of paper and a pen, and tried copying all the characters on the あ line multiple times until I could write them without looking at the book. I remembered that I had to do A I U E O in that order. I then moved on to the か line, then the さ, etc. By the time two days had passed, I had learned all the kana.

What better way to spend two days when you're on vacation, sitting in your grandmother's trailer in Florida, with the rest of the family out doing something you didn't want to do, and sweating your ass off cause the air conditioner was busted? I sat there and listened to CDs and read a book I'd bought on Japanese. I would sleep next to the damned thing.

Now I can read most of the first 3 or 4 grades' kanji without even thinking about it. This was six years ago, and I've only had one year of "real" Japanese classes, at college. I got the highest grade in the class, both semesters, and never studied for anything.

Manga (sound effects for katakana) and flipping through Japanese websites helped me. `~`

Just photocopy the relevant pages from the Encyclopedia Britannica and copy away!

WRITE WRITE WRITE! you will never learn kanji/furigana just by looking at flashcards or a book. practice writing the individual characters over and over again by themselves, and then start writing out words. >>11 is right: just keep writing and writing and writing and before you know it you will be a furigana expert!

>>12

Helped me too. I actually learned Katakana first with an old game called Slime Forest, you may have heard of it. I actually find katakana harder than hiragana, mostly because you see more hiragana in practical Japanese and used for furigana. Practice practice practice, you definitely want to learn the stroke count to remember them when writing. Thats the thing about Japanese, its really easy to read but I find it still hard to remember hte stroke count on my kanji....

mnemonics can help a lot too
ぬ this for instance looks like a dog (i NU) barking
め this looks like a goat this looks like ME
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henohenomoheji <= here is more

へ　へ
の　の
　も
　へ

>>14
agreed. writing is the most important part. as an embarrasing but true personal example, sometimes i forget what a handwritten kana looks like exactly, so i just get out some paper and write it down to check. my hand moves out of habit to write the character my brain forgot.

>>16
Are you blind?

                ぬ
                ^ \
                |  the mouth open
            the ear

ぬるぽ

It's really not that hard, all you need is a couple charts and some explanatory notes about stuff like small-tsu. (If you want to learn how to write them you'll need something to show you the stroke order, the order you write them in matters, but you probably don't need to care about handwriting yet/ever.)

There's a nice little tutorial at http://disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/japanese/japanese.html although it's geared towards reading video game titles, kana are the same everywhere. Just pull up one of those charts and then try reading stuff by looking up each character one by one. It really doesn't matter what you read or whether you understand it, old Japanese NES or Game Boy games on emulators work well because they usually don't use any kanji. Eventually after looking them up over and over you start to remember them and don't need to look at the chart as often.

It is easier if you live in Japan and are forced to read them all the time.

Har har har!

but if you read japanese newspaper you will only find kanjis D:

Mnemonics is THE way to learn both kana and kanji. The dumber connections you make, the easier they are to learn.

For example, chi = ち looks to me like an angry face. Therefore I think of it as a CHInese person's face.
For ha = は I imagine the left part being a rapist about to rape the "person" to the right, while he's laughing: "Ha ha ha ha!"

Make up whatever stories you see fitting.
Remember: The dumber the better!

>>24
Particles Particles lol

kana is easy: just write the symbols over and over again until u memorize them. it took my about 3 weeks to learn hiragana and katakana

Kanji on the other hand is extremely hard.. i kid thee not. Took me about 2 years to get to the point where i could read most manga (btw, manga isn't exactly very complex vocabulary/syntax... so thats not saying much). I'm still working on newspapers/literature/magazines.

my advice: buy books, take lessons/classes, and practice practice practice writing those kanji(stroke order is a bitch).

>>27
>(stroke order is a bitch)

Is it necessary to learn the stroke order for kanji? What practical use does it have?

The best way to learn Kana are writing them multiple times on multiple days and using flash cards. Writing is ALOT more important than flash cards however. No one cares if you can read the characters on a newspaper if you can't write them.

These people who say they learned ALL the characters in 2 days are either bull shitting or probably have the kana stored in their short term memory currently. If they don't continue to practice they'll probably be all forgotten.

>>28
Learning correct stroke order (atleast early on) helps you learn the correct way to write characters. By knowing the basics of how to correctly write characters it becomes pretty easy to look up characters in a kanji dictionary.

Learning correct stroke order later on keeps you from looking like a fucking idiot if you ever goto Japan.

Stroke order is really easy and if you understand the basics you'll almost always write the characters correctly or near correctly anyway

Just learn words. I know that i'll never forget kana in グロ or ロリコン。 

if stroke order wasn't important, than why would the japanese bother using it, lol... also, if u should ever need to write verticaly (which is common), stroke order is very f___ing important.

>>32

Why the fuck did you use underscores?

>>15
ahh, I'm currently studying the language of the beaners on my own.

>>32
The entire Japanese writing system is illogical. Why would you assume stroke order is any better?

>>35
The stroke order is SO illogical as collation order in Latin script.

REAL JAPANESE (kanas) system is VERY logical. That Chinese (Han/Kanji) shit is not.