The Secret To The Japanese Alphabet

Trying to learn the Japanese hiragana and katakana alphabets is not a straight-forward, simple task. Indeed, these two separate alphabets contain quite a vast number of characters in them which may seem a little daunting to the new student of the Japanese language.

The trick to mastering the kana (the japanese alphabets), is knowing certain mnemonics that you can memorise in order to refresh your memory of certain characters, and even of stroke order. You see a mnemonic is quite simply a word, a phrase, or an imagine that you use to associate a character with a Japanese alphabet sound.

One of the hardest things that new students of the Japanese language find to master is just how one can find a sound, in a character, that relates to an English, or romantic sounding sound. Such things are much easier than may be initially thought however.

You see the trick to mastering the kana is understanding a certain sound and how it relates to a certain emotion or feeling within us. Whilst a word such as 'no' may not have any real English sound, we can think of the word 'nod' for instance, as if an alien is 'nodding' its head. Indeed the character for 'no' looks just like a big head nodding, therefore we can associate this sound with the character.

The trick to mastering the Japanese alphabets is to make many such associations. Imagine any of the kana characters, and then imagine a way that you could associate them with a specific English sound, thought or object. If you make such relations between all of the Japanese alphabet characters and the specific sounds, you'll no doubt be on your way to mastering the kana in no time.