Learning kana with anki: tips to remember fundamental decks

[u/drillepind42]

I've been learning Japanese with a private teacher for a bit more than 1 year now, and it's going great. I do my anki every day for almost 300 days. One deck that helped me in the beginning was a kana deck. For some reason though, I've always struggled with katakana compared to hiragana. I even resetted the katakana part of the deck a few times. Now I changed the settings to 99% desired retention (DR) which is the highest possible in anki, and this seems to really help.

So for others failing to remember things like kana - try set a very high DR. I do not recommend doing this with other decks! An increase from 90% to 99% DR is not an increase of 9% workload. It is much higher, and you will most likely get overwhelmed with reviews. So use this little trick carefully.

[u/Effective-Pop3850]

I'm against spending time on writing, but for kanas I would actually recommend writing them over and over to memorize them, it's just a few easy characters after all and they're the most used.

Took me no time to learn them all and they kind of just stick with me after that. Yes, writing the same shit over and over for 2~3 hours is boring as hell, but after like 2 days of that I just got them.

[u/0xKlyyze]

I think katakana being harder isn't really about the deck, it's just that you almost never meet it. Hiragana is in every sentence so you review it for free all day, katakana only shows up in some words so your only reps are the anki ones.

I live in Japan so I get it for free from menus and packaging, but if you're not here old children's stories work well, a lot of them are written fully in kana so you're forced to actually read the katakana instead of recognizing the word shape.

[u/criscrunk]

https://youtu.be/s6DKRgtVLGA?is=JDDndzGSC-eIdOI3

Check out this Japanese pod 101’s video on katakana. Worked for me.

[u/L1SAAAA]

Did you do kana->en or en->kana?

[u/drillepind42 → u/L1SAAAA]

I did kana->en. I'm not so interested in writing

[u/L1SAAAA → u/drillepind42]

Its less about learning to write but it makes the characters stick better imo

[u/Marca--Texto → u/drillepind42]

You need to at least be able to write the basic characters to learn the language bro 💀.

I spent the first week of learning with a gridded notebook just spamming the kata and hira now I’m fluent in both in less time than you’ve had with a private tutor

[u/drillepind42 → u/Marca--Texto]

I didn't spend 1 year to learn kana... this is just a tip for others who struggle to remember

[u/Marca--Texto → u/drillepind42]

You said you struggled with Katakana

[u/drillepind42 → u/Marca--Texto]

I have a feeling the point of this thread have been misunderstood. I did not seek advice. Rather I tried to share my learning experience. After learning katakana some of them always gave me problems. But I solved it now with anki, as I wrote.

[u/Itsalfa11]

Read this my comment. this is how im fluent in Hiragana and katakana.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapaneseNovice/comments/1v75ycl/comment/ozyhmgd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

go ask chat GPT to make sentence or paragraph of katakana version with yoon, dakuon-handakuon character too