It’s getting harder. As I tried to revise each set of characters i learnt, I am having a hard time doing revision.
The most common set of characters consists of 50 Hiragana and 50 Katakana. So far, I’m at 50% and it’s getting harder to memorize the strokes especially for Hiragana.
Moreover, some of the Hiragana characters seem to be similar to one another like,
きand さ
っand う
Not only the Hiragana, the Katakana also has their own similarities!
シ and ツ
ク and ケ
ス and ヌ
Now I’m at the Na set and it is super hard to write these: ぬ ね な
I am really bad at cursive writings!
How I study these characters:
I am not someone who can memorize something easily. I rely on writing profusely. There’s only 14 empty boxes in the writing book and 14 is definitely insufficient for me. So I wrote A LOT of times on my foolscap paper.
For the characters, I tried to associate the strokes with Chinese characters especially for Katakana. You will learn the basic vowels a, i, u, e, o in your first set of characters. Subsequently, just add on the consonants, like K, S, T, N.
Pretty much like the vowels in Korean, ㅏ ㅣ ㅜ ㅔ ㅗ and consonants ㄱ ㅅ ㄷ ㄴ
So if you have tried Korean before, pronunciation is not something new. For me it was really the strokes and differentiating them between both tables.
But, practice makes perfect. 练习即王道。
I believe everyone has the same situation when you are just a beginner in a foreign language. Keep going!
P.S: “Just to share that the very first vocabulary that I learnt from my book is あさ (morning). This is not a greeting word like ‘Good Morning’ but more of a word that indicate time in the sentence. For example:
I go to school every morning.
I picked up this word because it was the first word I saw from the book, and I was able to recognize it from a subtitle in Jdrama. “
