like i've had hiragana down for a while but i've always suffered with katakana so i'm using grid paper right now

and writing each character a full sheet. so that's like 154 times....

but i'm llke is there even a better way i don't know

Real Kana

when i was learning kana i checked a couple rows at a time, then didn't stop until i consistently got every one right

rinse and repeat, eventually adding in more rows at a time

sticks head in here
i'm a bit rusty on some katakana myself i might check that out

for me i picked up on katakana a lot faster after spending a month in japan and having to read it all over the place, BUT obviously 'go to Japan' is not the easily accessible study method

but when i was learning it for classes that site helped me a lot

I've always learned Japanese things by trying to translate. There are a lot of songs that have been katakana-ified for J-speakers. It's not a precise "I have a

test on this" thing, but it's always felt really natural for me

i went to japan for about two weeks but i didn't nail it as well pft
also idk about remembering kanji but Jisho is hella good for identifying them

for learning and memorizing kanji i'd recommend wanikani

you can search by radicals, so if you don't know the meaning or reading and can't c/p it for whatever reason it's helpful

and also just straight up intensive reading. as in trying to read something and stopping to look up every kanji you don't know

(also, lifehack: if you use the google translate app on your phone, you can take a picture of japanese text/kanji and it will identify & translate it for you.

makes it easier to look up kanji without digging through radicals)

^ that seems to be the primary method of a lot of the self-taught japanese speakers i know (intensive reading)

i could maybe try asking the fansub group i work for if they have any other suggestions but yeah

I use wanikani already, actually! I love it a lot. And I have like rough translated the AKB0048 Heart Gata manga so I have that rough trnslated but.

Did you guys write them out a lot at any point too? I'm finding this helpful since I'll be writing in class a lot but maybe writing each too much rn

i did it for like 4 years in high school so yeah I personally did the writing out a lot method
not as intensively as you seem to be tho

also RE getting the basics down with katakana, there are sites like Omisoaji that give Japanese translations for Western music 洋楽翻訳☆お味噌味 - オリジナル歌詞和訳の妄想旅行へ

I think it helps to see things like "oh that's how you write 'Justin Beiber' phonetically!"

and even things like the way to use ディ instead of ヂ

I also write everything out, but that was mostly out of necessity because we didn't have online translators in my day so I had to write things down and look them up >>

*also wrote

or like we HAD online translators but they were garbage for anything that wasn't a romance language

ah yes
flashbacks to the brick-sized japanese to english dictionaries we had in class

Haha, i have a brick size one and I've had it for a while since I feel like it helps sometimes but some dictionary apps are great.

but thank you guys! i'm trying to figure out decent ways to study/memorize since

while writing it out works its also a matter of putting it to use for me too.

ngl i wouldn't mind a brick one for reference purposes but yeah the convenience of dictionary apps is hard to argue

any japanese study tips is a+

yeah i don't carry my dictionary to class it's more for at home stuff

but i think i also got pretty lucky with my classes in that our professor while not japanese lived in japan multiple times and learned business/casual/different dialects. and he also has his wife come in

who was born outside of tokyo and she does most of the speech portion which is cool. so i think outside of home stuff i'm pretty set in that way

my japanese teacher in hs had worked for a couple of japanese companies and my school did pretty regular study trips over there, so she was in and out of japan really frequently and was v familiar

with that sort of thing as well so yeah, i think it really helps

hahaha I just wrote them over and over and over and over

kanji is turning out to be the same

for me to learn them I mean

HOW DO YOU GUYS TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SHI AND TU

like i know one is kinda more vertical... but its so small.

so so small

shi and tsu*

it's how you write it

start shi from the bottom

start tsu from the top

in print, you can usually tell by the angle of the line and the thickness of it

it's one of those things that gets easier with repetition -- I have to write ジェシカ a lot so I see a lot of shi when I put my name on things. XD

My katakana book used as a mnemonic for シ the fact that it looked like the chin and lips on a woman's profile.

(so, "she" -- that way you can remember that when the two lines come in from the left and the bottom line is tilted more towards the horizontal, it's shi)