Learn hiragana and katakana!

[~Dan~]

Hiragana charts.



Note that 'ki' looks different on the chart to the way you'll see it written on the computer - き
Also 'sa' - さ
When you've printed the charts out write them onto the chart.



Katakana charts.



It helps if you print them out as it's awkward looking through the different charts if they're on the computer.

Before you even start, without even looking at the charts you should be able to read this - ミニモニ.  If you can't read it be very ashamed of yourself.  If you can read it then you know 3 katakana already.
How about つんく?  Again you should be able to read that without looking at the chart.  Thats 3 hiragana you should know already.

I'm not gonna go into a long explanation here.  Basically I was looking up stuff on sites, and romanising song titles by pasting the kanji into Jim Breen's WWWJdic (click 'Translate words in Japanese text') and it gives you a translation of the word, and more importantly gives you it in hiragana/katakana.  Then I looked the letters up on the chart.  In just a few weeks I found I was remembering characters and not having to look at the chart so often.
That's all really.  I'm still not good with soma katakana so I guess I need more practice.

[Foxy Brown]

Here's another resource that may prove useful. It has animated gifs to show the order of the strokes and mp3s to help with pronunciation.

Katakana
Hiragana
Kanji

[Loki!]

Glad I took my books seriously.

Kanji still shoots me in the ass though.

[StreakInTheSky]

I learned katakana and hiragana from the internet too and romanizing some stuff. I know some kanji that way too.

But thank god for school.

[shadowstar]

I should really start reviewing these again, lol!

I forgot a whole bunch of katakana characters so quickly, I'll probably re-learn them while I have spare time in NYC next week.

[Ayabie]

I've memorized the majority of them, including diphtongs, dakuten and handakuten.

シ, ン, ソ, ツ were confusing at first.  

[maliciel]

Wow, nice charts. I should print those out. Since I have no other way of learning JP at the mo.

[Zero_]

Wow, nice charts. I should print those out. Since I have no other way of learning JP at the mo.

The Japanese you read in books, is almost completely different than to that actually spoken in Japan, it's amazing really. My friend's brother did 4 years Japanese at school, went to Japan, and could hardly pick up any words in a conversation, so stayed there for a few years and re-did Japanese. Don't know how he's going though...

[Mikachu]

A silly but useful and helpful game that helped me learn hiragana and katakana is slime forest adventure, it's available (for free) from http://lrnj.com, you probably want the windows/linux/osx free version from a bit down. After you've done all the kana it starts on kanji, but i don't like his method of teaching kanji so much. (it just teaches english meanings, not readings)

[StreakInTheSky]

 I played that game a couple years ago. It's actually pretty fun.

[Dronak]

Note that 'ki' looks different on the chart to the way you'll see it written on the computer - き
Also 'sa' - さ

I believe that's because when the characters are written with a brush instead of a pen/pencil, it lifts to go into the curved bottom of the character, causing the top to be missing or very light.  I think when I started out, I had some trouble recognizing ko (こ) for a similar reason.  I think sometimes the two lines were connected because a brush stroke lift between the two lines could drag across and create a thin diagonal line.  It took me quite a while to find the right character for something that looked like a Z.  

シ, ン, ソ, ツ were confusing at first.

No doubt.    They still confuse me.  I try to think of them as faces, one-eyed or two-eyed and looking down/left or up/right, but I still get them mixed up.  That's probably because I don't practice reading kana enough.