Hiragana

 Learning hiragana is not too difficult and I find it very rewarding because after you learn it you can read a lot of Japanese, even if you don’t know what it means. It kind of demystifies the language because it is only made up of those sounds. I think learning to read English is a lot more difficult than hiragana because in English there’s a lot more sounds and things like silent letters and foreign words that are all pronounced differently. However, adding katakana into your learning takes more time to read Japanese. Not to mention kanji, which is much more difficult than either hiragana or katakana. I know some kanji but they are much more difficult to remember and they often change meaning based on context. If I remember correctly, you can speak fairly good Japanese without knowing many kanji because a lot of them are rarely found in everyday speech. I don’t remember learning English but learning hiragana for me consisted of comparing them to pictographs to remember the sound they made and then drilling them with flash cards for about a week, I followed the same process for katakana. During times when I’m not around much Japanese I usually forget how to read some of the characters but after going back through them it doesn’t take much time at all to remember them. Writing them is a little bit more difficult than learning them, especially because there’s some variation to how they can be written. Also, recalling them enough to write them without looking at an example is a lot more of a challenge. While writing the chart, even though I have a good grasp of hiragana, I still needed an example to write them all correctly. I am getting to the point where I can write a lot of them without needing a reference, which is fun and rewarding because I can write some of my own sentences entirely in Japanese without help!