Forty six symbols in each of two sets, and a fortnight to make both automatic. That is the whole of it as a memorisation job, and it is the smallest piece of work in this subject by a wide margin. What makes the fortnight worth taking seriously is what the two sets are for: hiragana carries the grammar and katakana carries anything borrowed, so a reader who knows both can see the joints of a sentence before reading a word of it.
Which is why being slow at kana is expensive out of all proportion to their difficulty. Everything downstream of reading is running at the speed of the slowest script.
Six facts and the kana are done
- they are syllabaries, not alphabets. Each character is a whole syllable, usually a consonant plus a vowel, so there is no letter for k on its own.
- hiragana and katakana are 46 each, the same set of sounds written twice in two different shapes. Learning the second is much faster than the first because the sounds are already known.
- katakana is for foreign words, for emphasis and for onomatopoeia, so a katakana word in a sentence is usually a borrowing and often guessable from English.
- dakuten turns か into が. Two small strokes convert an unvoiced sound to a voiced one across the whole set, which means the 46 cover far more than 46 syllables.
- the small tsu doubles a consonant, marking a held stop, and it changes meaning: it is the difference between two real words.
- kana is a two week job and it must be finished before anything else starts. Learners who stay on romanised Japanese stall permanently.
Two sets, two jobs, and one of them gets no practice
Hiragana does the grammatical work: the particles marking who did what, the verb endings carrying tense and politeness, and the words that have no kanji or whose kanji nobody bothers with. It is in every sentence and it gets practised constantly, so it becomes automatic on schedule.
Katakana carries loanwords, onomatopoeia, and anything the writer wants to set apart. Beginner material contains very little of it, so it is learned second, practised less, and stays slow for years in a great many learners. It is also the script carrying the words you would otherwise recognise for free, which makes the imbalance expensive rather than merely untidy.
Three small pieces sit on top of both sets and cause more trouble than the symbols do. The dakuten, two marks that voice a consonant, so the same shape covers two sounds. The small tsu, which is not a sound but a doubled consonant and a held beat. And in katakana the long vowel bar, which replaces the vowel-doubling that hiragana uses, so the same lengthening is written two different ways depending on the script.
Katakana English is not English
Here is the stall and it surprises people who expected the loanwords to be a gift. A borrowed word is reshaped into Japanese phonology on the way in, and Japanese syllables end in a vowel, so consonant clusters get vowels inserted and the result is much longer than the original. The English is often unrecoverable until you have met the Japanese word.
The meanings move as well. A borrowed word frequently arrives with a narrower sense than it had, or a different one, or is a compound assembled in Japanese out of English parts and never used in English at all. So a learner who treats katakana as a free vocabulary list will read it slowly, mishear it in speech, and be confidently wrong about a fair share of it. The repair is to drill katakana on loanwords specifically, out of real material, rather than on the syllable chart, which gives you the shapes and no reason to read them.
What borrowing does to a word
English syllables, and the beats they become
Japanese syllables end in a vowel, so every consonant cluster gains one. The distance is why the loanword is not recognisable by ear.
Syllables in the English word, against beats in the Japanese one.
In EnglishIn Japanese
- strike15One syllable becomes five beats, and nothing about it sounds English
- Christmas25Both clusters gain vowels, at the front and in the middle
- building23And it collides with the word for beer, which arrives at the same shape
- table24The final consonant needs a vowel of its own
- smartphone26And it is usually shortened again afterwards, to something shorter than either
The last row is the second half of the problem. Long borrowings get clipped in Japanese, so the word finally in use is neither the English original nor the full transcription, and no rule predicts where the cut falls.
Two ways to get through the fortnight
A mnemonic kana chart is the standard route and it works: each shape is attached to a picture that contains its sound, and the whole set goes in over a few days rather than a few weeks. It replaced the writing-out drill, which is the method most people try first and which trains the hand while the eye stays slow. Free versions are widely available and any of them will do, since the mnemonics are interchangeable and the schedule is what matters.
The second is a katakana drill built from loanwords rather than from the chart, and it is the one nobody does. Take a page of a menu, a shop sign, a games list, anything full of borrowed words, and read it aloud until the shapes stop needing to be decoded. It replaced practising katakana on the syllable table, which is the same problem with the meaning removed, and the meaning is what makes a reading confirm itself.
The mistake: treating the fortnight as optional
Kana can be half learned, and a learner who half learns them can still make progress, because material for beginners provides a romanised version alongside. That crutch is available for exactly as long as it takes to become a habit, and then it stops being available and the reading has to be built from the beginning.
Do the fortnight and then remove the romanisation entirely, including from your own notes and your own cards. It is uncomfortable for about a week. Everything after it, including the character work in readings, radicals, and an order that makes them stick, assumes that the kana are invisible, and a learner who is still decoding hiragana while trying to learn kanji is paying twice for every word.
What the kana show you
Because the script changes at every boundary, the kana are marking the particles, and the particles are the only signs of who did what in a Japanese sentence, which is particles, and a verb that waits at the end. They also carry the verb ending, which is where the politeness is decided, in plain, polite and humble, and choosing between them. The katakana layer is one of three vocabularies with three different registers, in native words, Chinese readings, and English borrowings. And the reason the fortnight is worth doing properly rather than quickly is the ordinary argument about foundations in why you forget, and the schedule that beats forgetting.