Title: Remembering the Kana (Part two: Katakana)
Author: James W. Heisig
Rating ***** 5/5 stars
Heisig did not disappoint me in the second part of his book "Remembering the Kana" in teaching me Katakana. Again I learned this written Japanese language in about 2 and a half hours and without much difficulty! Although I feel like it was somewhat harder than the Hiragana section, this could have been my bias towards my dislike of Katakana haha.
So I gave this 5 stars, because I know from experience without this book I would have waited ages to learn katakana, just because I wasn't looking forward to it at all. And even if I tried to tackle learning it, I would have failed without Heisig's teaching methods.
All I can say in short is, if you need to learn katakana, then read "Remembering the Kana"! I'm looking forward to starting "Remembering the Kanji" also by Heisig because if the method of learning is the same, then I will have an easier time learning. After learning the Heisig way I can't even imagine learning the characters simply by writing them down and using blunt memorization! The thought makes me cringe!
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Glad you're enjoy Heisig's method! I think it's a really great idea to get katakana/hiragana memorized as early as possible. You'd be surprised how much you could get by with just that (I was definitely surprised by how much of menus in Japan were full of katakana!). If nothing else, it just feels awesome to be able to read little things here and there; not only is it a huge step, you can really *feel* that it's a huge step, and that's great motivation I think.
ReplyDeleteKanji's a whole other ballgame, but it's nothing to be afraid of! I would definitely recommend to use Remember the Kanji coupled with an SRS system. Trust me, when you start knowing a lot of kanji, you feel awesome. You'll get there before you know it.
Good luck! がんばって！ ^_^
You'll have fun with kanji :) it's easy! I think the further you go the easier it is, too; you have more to work with.
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