Katakana

Learning katakana was very similar to learning hiragana but for me it took a bit longer. Some of them are easy to remember like the character for “ka” because it is very similar to the same one in hiragana. The dakuten doesn’t take too much longer to learn after the regular characters as it’s pretty much the same as in hiragana, the combined sounds are also easy to learn after you have the original characters. I think the most confusing thing about katana are the characters for “shi”, “so”, “tsu”, and “n”. Even now, I don’t actually have a very good grasp on them. I am a little rusty on katakana in general so I can’t recall them as well as I can hiragana but the characters I previously mentioned have never been super well remembered by me. For those, there’s essentially two sets of them that look almost identical but for some reason, I think because they’re the ones I have major issues with, I have a hard time remembering them all. I definitely need to brush up on my katakana more, using Duolingo for that has helped, because it takes me a long time to read anything written in it that I haven’t seen a lot. Some words I have memorized from seeing them a lot so I don’t need to sound the word out, but when I do I usually need to pull out a chart for one or two characters. Also, I cannot recall them when I want to write them very well like I can with a lot of the characters for hiragana. So, even if I can read a word without help I will usually need help to write it. While my knowledge of katakana needs work, when I can read a word in it, I usually already know what it means because a lot of times it’s a word that came from English. Immediately knowing what a word means after reading it is rewarding so I appreciate that, and I like telling people the Japanese versions of American words because I think it’s a fun fact and usually fun to say.