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Heehee. I can write them. I feel shmart. whee It's a cute site! Very useful! biggrin

I got this book "Kana Pict-O-Graphix: Mnemonics for Japanese Hiragana and Katakana" it is super helpful for long term memorazation. (I dont do so hot in the area of memorizing things so I can vouch for it) It has pictures that relate to the sound and shape of the kana to help you remember.

I'm learning Hiragana at the moment...I should be on to Katakana by next week or so. Then level 4 joyo kanji...

here's a website that focuses a lot on the Japanese language. You can probably tell from the URL. Anyway, the first two lessons teach you all of Hiragana and all of Katakana. It's really useful, I learned those two from it. However, there are two things out of place in the second lessons, but everything else is in order smile

It's easy to figure out.

www.freejapaneselessons.com

Yar!

Eh?! Thank you! ^_^ I'm pretty ok with speaking what I know, but I never learnt to read or write kana!

Thanks those sites are really helpfull! I have to brush up on my hirigana. I am so bad at remembering stuff thats why I didnt do too well in my japanese class.

heart Acacia heart

A great series of books for learning kanji is called "Remembering the Kanji" by James W. Heisig. It's different from most methods in two major ways:

1. You learn the meaning and the writing first, rather than learning both how to write, what it means, and how to read it at the same time. The reasoning behind this is that Chinese people learning Japanese are often much more successful at learning the Japanese written language because they already know how to write the kanji and what its basic meaning is; they mostly have to learn how to read it. Therefore, in the first volume, you focus on learning to write it and he assigns a keyword to each one. Then, the second and third volumes focus on the reading (I believe the third one is more advanced readings; I'm not totally sure because I don't have that one yet).

2. For the writing, it focuses on your imaginative memory (rather than learning by repetition or, for the most part, seeing some type of pictograph when there isn't one there - though he does use pictographs sometimes), by breaking most kanji down into parts that he calls primitives (some of them can be radicals, but a lot of them aren't, so he doesn't call them that), and using the meanings of all the primitives to create a little story to imagine to help you write it. For example, the kanji for which he gives the keyword "bull's eye" (的 - sorry if you can't see that) has the primitive for "white bird" on the left and "ladle" on the right, and his entry reads:



Eventually (and for most the of the book) you make your own stories based on the primitives.

I'm only on the first book, and still not finished, but I have found it very useful in learning to write kanji. I learned how to write roughly 550 kanji in a month when I was practicing most days. Total, I can write about 730 (I drill myself regularly). Of course, you have to follow the method correctly. Don't drill yourself by looking at the kanji and saying the keyword. The best way is to look at the keyword and write the kanji.

If you're interested, you can actually download the entire first part of the book, where he makes all the stories for you, via .pdf. http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/miscPublications/pdf/RK4/RK4-00.pdf

I highly recommend it.