Step 1: Hiragana

In short, making this seem like 'steps' to achieve Japanese is faulty. So for that fact, there will be some "Step 1.5's" between them if need be. Moving on, I'll present you with the FIRST resource that I (and maybe you) will use. The website, for free mind you, is called Tofugu. We'll be using this for learning the first two alphabets which are Hiragana and Katakana.

If you have checked out other resources on learning hiragana, you'll notice that the guide is different than most other learning guides. For one thing, it's based on mnemonics which are images that are supposed to trigger the kana.

Kana for "a" (pronounced -ah). See the little A inside it?

Before I actually get down to the method itself, let me explain something first. There are three alphabets in Japanese. Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana is used for words that have no Kanji or if it's too obscure to word. The order in which we learn them in will be Hiragana>Katakana>Kanji. The reason why we're learning it first is because it's the most useful as a beginner and you'll be able to use it on resources. Anyway's on with the lesson.

The reason why I immediately latched onto this as a guide was because of the very simple "No writing" requirement. Although writing is important so in another post I will show some resources to it, not to mention it's great for memory.

It even has (some) pronunciation videos to get you on the right track too:

 I, admittedly, learned Hiragana in the span of 2-3 months at my leisure. Although it's very much possible to learn it in less than that time because I wasn't very adamant about learning it until a month ago. If you want to learn where I'm at, I'll tell you when we get there.

Our next post will be about writing Hiragana and possibly a new source that's different from this since everyone learns differently. True, this is MY unruly approach, but I also want to cater to those who learn differently so I'll put out some other resources as well.

Until then, さよなら!


Sources used: Koichi. "The Ultimate Guide To Learning Hiragana - Tofugu." Tofugu. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Feb. 2016.

Koichi. "Learn Hiragana Today #1: Pronunciation." YouTube. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Feb. 2016.