Learning Japanese with mneumonics

Learning a second language has never been easy. There are however people who are an exemption to this rule. My cousin is one. She has a special knack for learning languages. But for the regular people out there, there must be an easier way to learn Japanese. You can learn Japanese by brute force or you can memorize it the easy way. Use mnemonics instead.

Mnemonics works by relating a certain word with an event or a story. It's basically about correlating things for us to remember it more easily. I have tried this and amazingly you can memorize quite a few characters in a short amount of time.

Japanese is basically made up of three alphabets-The Katakana, The Hiragana and The Kanji

The Hiragana
-This is made up of 46 charactes. This is used for japanese words and phrases.

The Katakana
-Also made up of 46 characters and complements the Hira. This is used for foreign words. Admitedly for me, it was a bit hard to find the correct Kata for a certain word. Since we are dealing with syllables here and not letters. When expressing a foreign word to japanese. You have to go by how the word sounds like. Take the word "beer" for example. The Kata for that would be "bi-ru".

The Kanji
- I don't know how many Kanji characters there are but I know that there's a lot. Harder to memorize because of the complex brush strokes.

So what do we need to learn to read manga? We should memorize the Hiragana and the Katakana first. Then we go ahead with the Kanji. Most manga geared for teens have a combination of the the three alphabets. However for those not so familiar with Kanji, the manga-ka usually includes the Furigana beside the Kanji character. Furigana is like a decomposition of the complex Kanji into several easily recognizable Hiragana characters.

In my next post I will tell you the book I use to memorize this. Perhaps I'll even post links to the flash cards that I use.