2026-03-12:
- All the base katakana are done. On to the dakuten, combination kana, and the katakana odd balls, of which there are quite a few. Because katakana are used to represent foreign words, katakana includes a number of sounds that are not native to Japanese, and therefore not part of the hiragana.
- Completed the “Writing Systems and Pronunciation” chapter of Tae Kim’s guide.
- I haven’t yet made much progress in Genki I, so the vocabulary I am running into in Anki has quickly become quite challenging. I am muddling through.
2026-03-09: n- and h- katakana consonants done.
2026-03-07: I have the first four groups of katakana down (vowels; k-, s-, and t-consonants).
2026-03-05: At this point I have committed all the Hiragana to memory, with near 100% recall. I installed Anki, and a deck based on Genki I, and started practicing with that. Next steps:
- Get back in Genki I itself,
- A quick review of my course notes from the conversational Japanese course I took,
- Start working on katakana. This should be relatively quick, given I have hiragana down.
Buying SHIN NIHONGO 500 MON prep guide for the JLPT N4-N5 was a mistake. It will be useful in the future, but I am no where near ready to start using it. You can safely save this, and its N3, N2 equivalents, until you are ready to prep for an exam.
2026-03-03: I have committed the characters with dakuten and handakuten to memory. A mildly interesting side effect of focussing on reading and not writing: show me a hiragana character and I will tell you what it is. Ask me to conjure out of my own mind the shape of a given character, and I stumble.
If you say “What is か?”, I’ll say “That is ka.”
If you say “What is ka?”, I’ll struggle to bring the character to mind.
Maybe this is obvious since I am not practicing writing at the moment.
On to the digraph characters. These should be pretty easy. I know how they are formed and I know all the base characters.
I picked up the SHIN NIHONGO 500 MON prep guide for the JLPT N4-N5 exam. I think I need to learn katakana before I can start using it, but I have been practicing “reading” the hiragana in it, even if I don’t always know what it is I am reading, for lack of vocabulary.
2026-03-02: I have achieved perfect recall of all 46 base hiragana. Some review tomorrow and then on to the dakuten and handakuten.
2026-02-28: I have achieved perfect recall of the vowels, and the k, s, t, n and h syllable groups. I’m adding perfect recall of new syllable groups at a rate of 1-2 per day.