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Memorizing

Sadiya-W

Sadiya-W

How do you memorize all the symbols?
Jimmy--1

Jimmy--1

Just Practice
2679

2679

with katakana and hiragana, I recommend practicing them a lot, just like Jimmy-san said. I personally learned them (as in memorized them without any paterns or other stuff to remember them logically) in a single day, but after that, for about 2-3 months I repeated the process of writing and rewriting them in a notebook and trying to remember them by stroke order. I did this almost every day in which I had about 15-30 minutes of free time. With Kanji, it's a whole new level of trying to learn them. For that, I recommend sticking to the course as Premium Plus and Platinum levels teach you some of them. As auxiliary learning tools (which proved to be quite effective for me) try the first 2 volumes of "Remembering the Kanji" by James W. Heisig. Though this is a very tricky part of learning Japanese and may take you a few years to master them. Anyway, the main point is: practice a lot by memorizing their stroke orders and by writing them a couple of times/day in a notebook or on a piece of paper.
richy

richy

I'm concentrating exclusively on the speaking and listening and not the writing. Will learning to read and write accelerate the level of speaking? I'm most interested now in speaking in social settings, stores, restaurants, etc, It seems to be faster leaning the words looking at the romaji rather than trying to also learn the hiragan and katakana.
2679

2679

Well, it would be a good idea to learn at least hiragana and katakana, but you can get by with just romanji up until Platinum level (though I don't recommend it). At the platinum level, you should at least be able to read and write hiragana and katakana, as that level also introduces a lot of kanji and it's a whole new thing then.
richy

richy

Ok, thanks for your comments.
Pascal-P

Pascal-P

@コッド Did you finish the 2 volumes of Heisig? I gave up :/ (schoolwork). Now I'm just practicing by translating some visual novels. Also, sign in on MSN when you get a chance. But yeah, just practice, practice and practice. I too learned all the symbols in a day, and then just reinforced over the next couple months.
2679

2679

Well, I gave up too as I have too much work to do during school. I dropped out at 1000 and I hope to finish the other half next summer.
CatPanda

CatPanda

My Tips for Hiragana and Katakana: First learn hiragana then learn katakana through hiragana. Instead of trying to memorize all 92 characters (46 x 2) at once, learn the 46 base hiragana then try to learn that ア is the katakana OF あ ... ヲ is the katakana OF を... in certain circumstances like カ (katakana) and か (hiragana) you'll notice how similar they can be at times. The only notable difference is the lack of the ' like symbol in the katakana version. Note that I said 46 base characters, because there really are only 46 distinctive base characters. When you start to memorize the hiragana with smaller characters like きゃ or にゃ see them as に+ゃ rather than trying to memorize にゃ as a character itself. The same being applicable for katakana キャ is キ+ャ. I'll talk about kanji tomorrow though.

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