This is the correct answer. The difficulty in learning a language stems from the similarities between your native language and the target language. English and Japanese have very little similarity, so it's difficult for Americans to learn Japanese. However, Koreans learn Japanese much more easily, since the languages are more similar. Not super-similar, but more similar than English-Japanese.

Furthermore, no language is "hardest" simply because no one would want to speak that language, so they would make it easier to speak subconsciously. All languages are equally difficult to speak: Kids of the same age in every location begin speaking language at the same age, regardless of whether they live in Tokyo, Moscow, or Boston.

ていうか、おまえ天才だよ。

Yes. I went, and appreciate the katakana flash cards, because I couldn't bring myself to look at the katakana in my book. One reason is because the book is rather old and when I was playing the Japanese demo of Phantasy Star Portable, I wrote EVERYTHING down; when I looked at the kana from the game and the book, I found that a few things were different. the other reason is that I couldn't be bothered to learn katakana, since I cared more for hiragana, especially because I ordered a magazine that aims to teach you to read kanji with furigana above the English text, and since the articles are supposed to be about Japan, I didn't think it might be necessary, though it's still a good idea to learn both anyway.

However, now that I've emphasized and re-emphasized that I DO know hiragana and am getting better at reading katakana, I was thinking that it might not be such a bad idea to make flashcards and a quiz that consists of both kana. That way, the person is truly tested to see if they REALLY do know both to perfection, instead of being great at one and terrible at the other.

Separating them is good when you're initially exposed to it, but afterwards, there should be something to test you on both at the same time, because that gives emphasis to knowing and remembering both and the differences between them, a necessary ability to have in conjunction with knowing kanji, since all the publications will have quite a bit of all three.

Spoonybard,

Thank you for taking a look at the site. I agree with your sentiments regarding learning both hiragana and katakana. When I was taking Japanese classes at my university, everyone knew hiragana very well, but was very spotty on katakana. There was less emphasis on katakana, but like you said, publications do include both kana sets.

In case you did not notice, there was an option to include both hiragana and katakana into the flashcards and quizzes.

I've also been trying to figure out how to help people actually learn how to write these characters instead of just simply recognizing them. Someone had suggested that for the flashcard, create random combinations of romaji and have them write it out in kana. This would work, but I think it would be better if they used vocabulary words in conjunction with this.

So on the vocabulary flashcards (Vocabulary Flashcards - thejapanesetutor.com), I've added options to have romaji on the front side, and on the backside, kana.

Let me know what you think. If there are any other ways to improve learning kana, feel free to share it with me and i'll try and add it onto the site.

-Tony

I would very much like to suggest that this thread be closed. It's attracting too many liars.

On JF and other forums like this, NONE of the people who claim that Japanese is an easy language to learn have ever demonstrated their Japanese proficiency to support their claims.

The OP is no exception. I demanded that he write something in Japanese and he ignored it. This is incomprehensible. I gave him a great chance to prove his point and he just ran away. I'm pretty sure that the newer guys just above who state that Japanese is easy would do the same if I asked them to "show" it instead of just "say" it. Frankly, if you're still talking about kana flashcards, you haven't seen anything yet.

As the member who has answered over 1,000 Japanese-related questions on JF including some tough ones about Classical Japanese, I know that the more serious Japanese learners have never said and will never say that the language is easy. They are right because Japanese isn't easy.

English is a foreign language to me and I've never said anywhere that English is easy. If you can translate this post into Japanese with ease (, which I can), then perhaps you can keep on telling others that Japanese is easy.

Agreed, Nagoyankee.

I think more misconceptions than facts are being propagated, so the thread is closed.