Remembering the Hiragana/Katakana

James Heisig

The first task is to learn the two phonetic syllabaries used in Japanese. Each has 46 basic symbols (plus a few extras). They’re not too hard to learn — I learned the hiragana in about a week by rote memorization. But then I bought this book and learned the katakana in about one hour!

This book is cheap and effective, and it is also an excellent primer for the methods used in the far more complex Remembering the Kanji books, which I also describe on this website.

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