I didn't Know That Meant Spaghetti in Japanese

June 6, 2019 6:09 AM

Traveling to Japan this fall. I would like to able to read and comprehend menus and most signs. What are the best online learning options for learning Katakana and Hiragana at an elementary school level?
posted by Xurando to Writing & Language (11 answers total)

I use an app called Kanji Teacher to brush up on my Kanji, and it has katakana/hiragana learning support. I like the flash cards and the quizzes.

However, most signs and menus will not be in katakana or hiragana, so you might want to look for a different study guide to recognize kanji related to what you want (food and signage) and learn them by rote. 'Elementary school level' reading includes thousands of Kanji, so that might not be a realistic goal by the fall.
posted by Alison at 6:42 AM on June 6, 2019

I’d focus on katakana. The foreign words katakana is used for are more likely to be useful and intelligible to you (borrowed from English). Katakana plus a handful of kanji often used for signs like station, exit. Also, I hear there are apps that can translate things for you with phone camera in a pinch?
This looks decent (katakana)
https://realkana.com/katakana/
Keep selecting more rows and peek at a chart as needed. Remember there are only five vowels. A as in baa the sound a sheep makes. I as in free. U as in two. E as in beg. O as in flow.
posted by sacchan at 6:42 AM on June 6, 2019

Be forewarned , katakana is sometimes hard to figure out what it means because 1) Japanese borrows from more than one language. The best example is パン which is pan and means bread. Hiragana alone is fairly useless. But it is the basis to everything else and a place to start. Depending on where you are in the fall wanikani teaches kanji well (first three levels are free!) But not in an order that would necessarily be useful and you need katakana snd hiragana to start.

There are tons of flashcards apps, I suggest lingodeer for basics.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:46 AM on June 6, 2019

RE katakana I forgot above is 2) sometimes the translation is very off or becomes to mean something different (マンションmanshon is lux appartment for example and 3) sometimes the way it sounds isn't close to the way it is said in English like アパートApaato means apartment.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:52 AM on June 6, 2019

I like the Dr. Moku mnemonics smartphone apps. That said, I agree with everybody else that you should extremely temper the expectation that knowing hiragana and katakana will make you able to read signs or restaurant menus.

Other things you may find useful in places without an English menu are pointing to dishes, or pictures of them (taking pictures on your phone of the plastic models of meals that many restaurants have out front can work well) and saying "Kore, onegai shimasu", which means "This, please."

Also, if you don't have any hard dietary restrictions, at places where you order by buying meal tickets out of a vending machine and then give the tickets to staff (very common in ramen and curry places), the top left button on the machine is usually the specialty of the house and will almost always be something good.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 6:56 AM on June 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Whilst learning all the hiragana may not be a priority, it's useful to recognise particles (eg は, or の) so you can get an idea of the structure of a sentence. If you've got the shape of the phrase and a few words from katakana or common kanji it's easier to guess the rest from context.
posted by BobInce at 7:10 AM on June 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

With ~3 months or so, you can get a decent, functional start. If you have a local community college or adult education program, check if they have Japanese language classes. Learning katakana would be part of an intro to Japanese, along with a ton of useful phrases that you can plug different nouns into like "Can I get that?" or "Where is the train station?"
posted by tobascodagama at 7:26 AM on June 6, 2019

As non-Latin scripts go, hiragana and katakana are very straightforward -- the relationship between Japanese kana and Japanese pronunciation is almost perfect, i.e. more like Spanish, less like English or French. If you really just want to be able to read kana and are good with rote memorization, this should take you relatively little time.

Unfortunately, though, like previous posters are saying, kanji are extensively used everywhere in Japan. In particular, the issue is that, very broadly speaking, kanji tend to be used for most content words, hiragana for grammatical and function words, and katakana for transliterated/foreign/borrowed content words and names.

But if you're mainly looking to read signs and menus, the content words are the most important but are therefore unfortunately most likely to be written in kanji -- e.g. in "spaghetti and meatballs" knowing how to read "spaghetti" and "meatballs" is more important than knowing how to read "and." If they're borrowed then they will be in katakana, but as pointed out above sometimes even being able to read the katakana still results in an incomprehensible word.

Just as an example, I have no idea how to correctly pronounce 炒め物 or 焼き魚 in Japanese, but from just the kanji -- I am a Chinese heritage speaker -- I can guess that the first one means "stir-fried items" and the second one means "grilled fish."

(I don't want to overstate the Chinese-Japanese point as I know there are many many false friends between Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji such as 非常 or 汽水, and I know that running Japanese text is a whole different thing than isolated nouns here and there, but I just wanted to make a general point about kanji.)
posted by andrewesque at 8:01 AM on June 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

For awhile I was using Read The Kanji. I was using it for the beta test and got a lifetime membership out of it, but I think hiragana and katakana are available on free trial. It’s a pretty decent flash card site that helped me with kanji for a while.

On the other hand, I learned both katakana and hiragana in about the space of a week when I got here. Pizza menus taught me katakana (as its all about identifying the katakana for words you know), and some really awesome toilet paper for kids taught me hiragana (little animals on each square with the Japanese for that animal in hiragana).

While the toilet paper might be out of reach, you could probably find pizza menus online. It’s just a question of taking a couple minutes a day, over a solid week, and most people pick it up pretty quickly. It might help to do a post it note study, for vocabulary building, just label everything in your place with post it’s with the Japanese word for the object. This would be pretty good for katakana, especially with most furniture items having katakana names.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:16 AM on June 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

I used this book Katakana for Fun when I was a kid and I really liked how they make them into pictures to help you memorize them.

I disagree with a lot of the above responses--I think katakana will be super useful! As sacchan said, most things written in it will be in English, or at least adapted from English, and you'll be surprised how much you're able to figure out.
I speak conversational Japanese but my kanji skills are pretty bad, and I get around quite well with a mix of katakana and guessing!
posted by exceptinsects at 1:22 PM on June 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Children's books in Japanese. Simple sentence structure, limited vocabulary, mostly hiragana and katakana with a little kanji for numbers. Pictures to help out. Recapitulating the way the Japanese themselves learn the language is a good way to pick up the language and some cultural background as well.
posted by SPrintF at 1:30 PM on June 6, 2019