Remembering the kana pdf download

My name is Maria. Obviously, the only way to attain fluency in written Japanese is to learn all three forms of writing. This little book should get you well on your way. Special thanks are due to Helmut Morsbach and Kurebayashi Kazue, who collaborated in the accompanying course on the katakana that forms Part two of the present book.

It was their initiative to undertake the project and their devotion that saw it through to the end. James W. It did not grow out of classroom experience and is not intended for classroom use. For one thing, I am not a language instructor. Most of my students are Japanese, who knew the hiragana by the first grade or before.

I did not absorb myself in research on the Japanese syllabaries, survey existing methods, draft a set of mnemonic techniques, test them out systemati- cally on a group of students, carefully record the results, and only then deliver a completed manuscript to the publishers. But neither did the idea occur to me on my own. The facts of the matter are a lot humbler: I wrote the book on a dare.

I set the paper on the corner of my desk and resolved not to pub- lish anything until I was satisfied I had grounds to justify its boast. From the very beginning I was aware that I was up to something outlandish.

Fortunately, the chore turned out to be a lot easier than I had antici- pated, and the basic text was completed in a few days. Once you have finished the task yourself, I am confident you will see how really simple the idea behind it is.

But enough of how this book was written. It is time to begin, following the instruction in the box below. Let us call it a hairpin to remember the similarity of form. The placing of the elements will aid you later in reviewing.

By open- ing the book part way, you can page through and see only the romanized form, leaving the actual hiragana hidden from view. You should not attempt to memorize the information in this frame now, though at a more advanced level you may find it interesting and helpful for learning the pronunciation of the original kanji. If you studied Latin, or know a romance language already, these examples will be largely superfluous. You should not attempt to imitate these; it is enough that you take a moment to recognize them.

The examples use only hiragana that have been learned up to that point, which means you should be able to identify them all—as well as reproduce them all from their romanization. You should not skip any of the examples, though there is no need to bother learning what the words actually mean in Japanese.

You can find them at any stationery store. This will help you keep the shape of your hiragana in proper balance much better than practicing on blank or simple lined paper will. One more thing. Take a look at the clock and make a note of the time. In less than 30 minutes from now you will be asked to record the time you have spent on these first 9 hiragana in the box provided below.

You have just learned 9 of the 46 hiragana, and probably spent less than 30 minutes doing so. Record there how long it took you to complete this first lesson. We will do this at the end of each lesson. A word about reviewing. If you took your time with each hiragana as you came to it, if you practiced writing it several times, repeating the explanation to yourself as you went, and if you tested yourself on all the sample words, there should be no need to retrace your steps.

If you do get stuck, turn to the Alphabetic list on page , locate the problem hiragana, and go through the page all over again, top to bottom. Whatever you do, do not waste your time writing any of the hiragana over and over again. Let me show you how easy it is. If you were planning on heading right into Lesson 2, change your plans and take a break now for at least 30 minutes.

Go out for a walk or stretch out on the sofa. Your mind has been watching images fly around like shuttlecocks and should be a bit dizzy just now.

In romanized Japanese, whenever this hiragana is followed by a vowel, an apostrophe is added to avoid confusing it with na, ni, nu, ne, or no. We will see an example of this use of the apostrophe later in this first lesson. So is the hiragana we are going to learn now. The first strokes of the two are almost identical.

And just as, when you are writing quickly, the dot on your i often ends off over to the right, so is the second, shorter stroke of the hiragana always set to the right. When you practice writing the form, take a pencil and trace over the strokes as they are given below. After practicing the form once or twice on blocked paper, test yourself on the examples that follow below. The easiest way to draw it with a single stroke is to begin in the upper right, draw the slash, and then bring the circle around.

The only other thing you have to remember is that there is no closing the circle. When this hiragana appears as a part of another hiragana with only a slight alteration of shape , we will take it to mean a no park- ing sign. An example follows later in this lesson. On the left, and drawn first, is a single slightly curved shape that looks like a cape you might hang on the back of a stick figure.

Draw one to see for yourself. To the right is a two-stroke shape that resembles a dagger with the hilt at the top and the blade below. The sound ke is close enough to the English word cape to get us going. When you draw the pieces, think of them as images, saying the words to yourself as you go along.

Below it a no-parking sign. The sound a calls to mind a playful little otter, swimming on his back in the middle of a pond whose banks are picketed on all sides by no-parking signs.

The first two strokes you would begin with the frame, without the teeth form the very shape that give us our next hiragana, pronounced, conveniently enough, ko. The two japanese syllabaries known as the hiragana and the katakana or collectively, the kana originated as stylized versions of Chinese characters used to represent the sounds of Japanese without any reference to the original meaning This book will help you teach yourself the writing and reading of all 46 characters each of Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabary from memory.

The poor readers encountered more difficulty in remembering the Kana digraphs , whereas the good readers were equally accurate on the Kana and Kanji materials.

The fact that the Kana digraphs were nonsense materials could be the source Why not have a Look Inside the book using the Look Inside feature above to see exactly how this customised Japanese writing system works.

Free sue Ece Gift! There is no greater difficulty in remembering the proper kana spelling of words derived from the Chinese than in the case of native Japanese words , and few well - educated persons would make a mistake in orthography in the present day There is no greater difficulty in remembering the proper kana Contrast learning Japanese Kana to learning English orthography: Knowledge of the English alphabet by itself does not The order of Kana is worth remembering because it is the order in which words are listed in dictionaries.

Skip to content. In six short lessons of about twenty minutes, each of the two systems of "kana" writing are introduced in such a way that the absolute beginner can acquire fluency in writing in a fraction of the time normally devoted to the task. Using the same basic self-taught method devised for learning the kanji, and in collaboration with Helmut Morsbach and Kazue Kurebayashi, the author breaks the shapes of the two syllabaries into their component parts and draws on what he calls "imaginative memory" to aid the student in reassembling them into images that fix the sound of each particular kana to its writing.

Behind the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China lie several coherent patterns. Identifying these patterns and arranging them in logical order can reduce dramatically the amount of time spent in the brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms. Many of the "primitive elements," or building blocks, used in the drawing of the characters also serve to indicate the "Chinese reading" that particular kanji use, chiefly in compound terms.

By learning one of the kanji that uses such a "signal primitive," one can learn the entire group at the same time.

In this way. Remembering the Kanji 2 lays out the varieties of phonetic patterns and offers helpful hints for learning readings, which might otherwise appear completely random, in an efficient and rational way. A parallel system of pronouncing the kanji, their "Japanese readings," uses native Japanese words assigned to particular Chinese characters. Although these are more easily learned because of the association of the meaning to a single word, Heisig creates a kind of phonetic alphabet of single-syllable words, each connected to a simple Japanese word, and shows how they can be combined to help memorize particularly troublesome vocabulary.

Unlike Volume 1, which proceeds step-by-step in a series of lessons, Volume 2 is organized in such as way that one can study individual chapters or use it as a reference for pronunciation problems as they arise. Individual frames cross-referencethe kanji to alternate readings and to the frame in Volume 1 in which the meaning and writing of the kanji was first introduced.

Volume 2 4th ed.