Learning Kana through "Decontextualization"
I currently have an idea that I believe will enable students in the learning of Japanese kana. I call it "Decontexualization"; or association without implication. Students first learn to associate kana with their sounds, rather than with arbitrary words.
This is not to say that students learn the kana in isolation. The method is as follows:
Let's start by looking at charts of hiragana and katakana.
http://shodan.co.za/images/katakana_chart.jpg
http://shodan.co.za/images/hiragana_chart.jpg
You'll almost certainly want to print these out, as in the first month or so you'll be referring to them constantly. Plus, you can check off that you studied a hiragana row and a katakana row each day. Note that the order goes from right to left, top to bottom. a i u e o is one row, ka ki ku ke ko is the next, and so on.
In modern times, Japanese kana are arranged in "a-i-u-e-o" order. It's kind of like alphabetical order; in a bookstore or a dictionary or so on, things are arranged a-i-u-e-o-ka-ki-ku-ke-ko and so on. So, knowing the order is important as well.
Also important is stroke order. It may not seem like a big deal with hiragana and katakana, but knowing the correct number of strokes does several things that are important.
1) It gets your mind in the habit of thinking of characters in terms of their number of strokes, which is essential for writing and looking up kanji.
2) Your characters look neater and more correct if they are written in the correct stroke order.
Start by learning to write a new 5-character row every day. I suggest writing on practice paper.
http://www.learn-japanese.info/practiceltblue.gif Though you can also use graph paper or lined paper if you like. The important thing to remember is to try and make your characters all the same size. Japanese, even written Japanese, is ideally a fixed-width writing system.
To learn the correct stroke order, use http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ssatoru/other/kana/ , a page with animated diagrams in Quicktime format, or some other animated website. http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/kana.html has the kana in .gif format.
The question raised by many is: how does one decontextualize the kana and still find a use for them? The answer is poetry. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/AnoMany.html The Manyoshu is the earliest collection of poetry in Japanese that survives. It was written in Manyogana, which we will discuss in the next few lessons, when we talk about how the Japanese writing system developed. The University of Virginia's Japanese Text Initiative has included with their transcription of the Manyoshu also includes hiragana copies of each poem. (Though there are some areas where there are question marks instead of kana; this is because kana readings have not been established.) The task in reading hiragana is to quickly establish a link between sound and meaning. For the first two weeks, the way we will do this is through transcription into romaji (what you're reading right now.)
So, the task for Day 1 is as follows:
1) Write the a-i-u-e-o row in hiragana and katakana 10 times each. That's a total of 100 characters.
2) Listen to the pronounciation for each character you've written, and try to mimic the pronounciation a few times. http://www.webpersonal.net/parabolix/manga/pronu.en.html
3) Using the Chart, take the first poem from the manyoshu and transfer it from hiragana to romaji. Then, read the poem out loud. In Japanese, this is easy because each character in Japanese is one unit, and each unit gets the same amount of time in a word.
If we look at a poem from later in the collection:
なごのうみに,ふねしましかせ,おきにいでて,なみたちくやと,みてかへりこむ
"na go no u mi ni" is seven units. In linguistic terms, they are called "morae". Each mora has the same weight, the same stress value, and the same length. Thus, Japanese does not stress any syllable of a word the way English does. (Japanese uses pitch accent, something we will discuss later.) Thus, one can transfer the poem into romaji and read it.
The task for Days 2 and beyond will be similar, but with the added task:
Write all the old characters three times each. When you write the Day 1 characters on Day 2, look at the stroke order once for each character before you write it. When you write the Day 1 characters on Day 3 and beyond, look at the stroke order diagrams only when you forget, or believe you've made a mistake.
The same goes for reading: when you transcribe a poem, beginning on the second day, use the characters you know instead of romaji when copying, then attempt to read. Your goal here is to read and write Japanese, so writing in romaji is only a pronunciation aid from which you should distance yourself as quickly as possible. Try not to use the chart for characters you've already studied, but don't beat yourself over the head.
Your goal for the first ten days is to simply get a good feel for reading and writing the hiragana and katakana.
This is not to say that students learn the kana in isolation. The method is as follows:
Let's start by looking at charts of hiragana and katakana.
http://shodan.co.za/images/katakana_chart.jpg
http://shodan.co.za/images/hiragana_chart.jpg
You'll almost certainly want to print these out, as in the first month or so you'll be referring to them constantly. Plus, you can check off that you studied a hiragana row and a katakana row each day. Note that the order goes from right to left, top to bottom. a i u e o is one row, ka ki ku ke ko is the next, and so on.
In modern times, Japanese kana are arranged in "a-i-u-e-o" order. It's kind of like alphabetical order; in a bookstore or a dictionary or so on, things are arranged a-i-u-e-o-ka-ki-ku-ke-ko and so on. So, knowing the order is important as well.
Also important is stroke order. It may not seem like a big deal with hiragana and katakana, but knowing the correct number of strokes does several things that are important.
1) It gets your mind in the habit of thinking of characters in terms of their number of strokes, which is essential for writing and looking up kanji.
2) Your characters look neater and more correct if they are written in the correct stroke order.
Start by learning to write a new 5-character row every day. I suggest writing on practice paper.
http://www.learn-japanese.info/practiceltblue.gif Though you can also use graph paper or lined paper if you like. The important thing to remember is to try and make your characters all the same size. Japanese, even written Japanese, is ideally a fixed-width writing system.
To learn the correct stroke order, use http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ssatoru/other/kana/ , a page with animated diagrams in Quicktime format, or some other animated website. http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/kana.html has the kana in .gif format.
The question raised by many is: how does one decontextualize the kana and still find a use for them? The answer is poetry. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/AnoMany.html The Manyoshu is the earliest collection of poetry in Japanese that survives. It was written in Manyogana, which we will discuss in the next few lessons, when we talk about how the Japanese writing system developed. The University of Virginia's Japanese Text Initiative has included with their transcription of the Manyoshu also includes hiragana copies of each poem. (Though there are some areas where there are question marks instead of kana; this is because kana readings have not been established.) The task in reading hiragana is to quickly establish a link between sound and meaning. For the first two weeks, the way we will do this is through transcription into romaji (what you're reading right now.)
So, the task for Day 1 is as follows:
1) Write the a-i-u-e-o row in hiragana and katakana 10 times each. That's a total of 100 characters.
2) Listen to the pronounciation for each character you've written, and try to mimic the pronounciation a few times. http://www.webpersonal.net/parabolix/manga/pronu.en.html
3) Using the Chart, take the first poem from the manyoshu and transfer it from hiragana to romaji. Then, read the poem out loud. In Japanese, this is easy because each character in Japanese is one unit, and each unit gets the same amount of time in a word.
If we look at a poem from later in the collection:
なごのうみに,ふねしましかせ,おきにいでて,なみたちくやと,みてかへりこむ
"na go no u mi ni" is seven units. In linguistic terms, they are called "morae". Each mora has the same weight, the same stress value, and the same length. Thus, Japanese does not stress any syllable of a word the way English does. (Japanese uses pitch accent, something we will discuss later.) Thus, one can transfer the poem into romaji and read it.
The task for Days 2 and beyond will be similar, but with the added task:
Write all the old characters three times each. When you write the Day 1 characters on Day 2, look at the stroke order once for each character before you write it. When you write the Day 1 characters on Day 3 and beyond, look at the stroke order diagrams only when you forget, or believe you've made a mistake.
The same goes for reading: when you transcribe a poem, beginning on the second day, use the characters you know instead of romaji when copying, then attempt to read. Your goal here is to read and write Japanese, so writing in romaji is only a pronunciation aid from which you should distance yourself as quickly as possible. Try not to use the chart for characters you've already studied, but don't beat yourself over the head.
Your goal for the first ten days is to simply get a good feel for reading and writing the hiragana and katakana.