For some reason I'm having a hard time finding this. Clearly pronounced and recorded audio for each kana sound? Preferably freely available, that is, no legal strings attached... I figure it could be useful to have for A)Remembering the Kana flashcards instead of using ローマ字, when people want to use audio from the onset of their learning (though I do think it was useful for typing, but I wouldn't want to have ローマ字 every rep if I was starting over)... and B)I want to use it to mod some dual n-back software sounds...

Edit: I just found some from a piece of software, but guess I can't share them since they're proprietary or something. ;p Plus they're going to be a pain to cut up, maybe I won't bother doing more than a handful... that third paper's dual n-back test got by with 8 Chinese phonetic sounds, so.

http://thejapanesepage.com/hiragana

Talk to them about usage. They've very nice.

What about smartfm.? Couldn't you extract the decks to anki, and then have the media files?

I wonder if learning the kana individually is really the best way? Maybe learning them in context would be better?

A few months ago, I tried to learn the cyrillic alphabet, and learning the letters all one by one was such a huge pain, because I kept getting them all mixed up. Then I decided to just add some russian words into anki and see what happened. I specifically chose words that were cognates (words very similar to english words), and I made sure I had coverage for all letters of the alphabet. I ended up learning all the letters VERY easily.

This only really applies to recognition though.

Zarxrax Wrote:I wonder if learning the kana individually is really the best way? Maybe learning them in context would be better?

A few months ago, I tried to learn the cyrillic alphabet, and learning the letters all one by one was such a huge pain, because I kept getting them all mixed up. Then I decided to just add some russian words into anki and see what happened. I specifically chose words that were cognates (words very similar to english words), and I made sure I had coverage for all letters of the alphabet. I ended up learning all the letters VERY easily.

Russian already has some letters in common, though, and the rest already look very much like English letters.

When learning the kana, I used a game that constantly drilled me on it to advance. For me, that was definitely the best way.

After I had learned them that way, the key was to read a lot and avoid romaji.

Having said that, I still can't -write- most kana 2 years later. -sigh-

I'm kinesthetic but I found this to be the best way:
Look at all the Hiragana characters and learn the 3 rules!
1) XっX =XX
2)か→が
3）ふ→ぷ

Then find a list of basic words that cover ALL the hiragana including tenten and maru characters.

つづく
りんご
あか
めし
そら
ect.

Then review words on flash-cards like this:

「りんご」 ＜ーーー＞　「ringo apple」
After you can read all the words try writing them from looking at the opposite side of the card and quizzing yourself.

I did it in a week this way without too much effort so all you need is 2 20 minute sessions a day for 'bout a week.

I don't know, I think Remembering the Kana is pretty much perfect. ;p

There's individual audio here: http://www.coscom.co.jp/ebook/kanawork/d...index.html

The mp3 path is: http://www.coscom.co.jp/ebook/kanawork/d...kana-a.mp3 (and kana-u and so forth, see links in pictures... )

Here's the collected audio to save time: http://www.mediafire.com/?whdyynznnmz - I'd probably rename them to the actual kana if I wasn't so lazy.

Honestly, if I were starting over, I don't know if I'd bother even using something like Heisig for the kana, I'd probably just have pictures with the stroke order + sounds and do the cards in Anki, writing them out, listening and repeating, and that's it. The rest (long/double/etc.) I'd learn in context. I can't remember how I originally used Heisig's book.

Just a quick update on what I'm doing for Brain Workshop (See "Forget Brain Age... " thread) - I replaced the letter audio (in \Brain Workshop\res\sounds\letters) with these files: http://www.mediafire.com/?ggwxyzmmwnz

Those are just audio files for 8 particles: へ　は　が　を　の　で　も　に

I had to replace the letter audio rather than the other audio because in Jaeggi mode apparently I can't change sounds. At any rate, I'm sure there's a better way if you want to tinker around with the .py files or whatever, but this is fine for me, works perfectly. So now I'm focusing on the sounds of particles during the dual n-back task. For now I suppose I'm leaving the visuospatial component (blue square) alone.

The reason I went with particles is because there were 8 letters and I think of those 8 particles as the main ones that would benefit most from getting used to recognizing and holding them in the mind amidst listening and attending to other modalities/information in a task-switching kind of process.

nest0r Wrote:Honestly, if I were starting over, I don't know if I'd bother even using something like Heisig for the kana, I'd probably just have pictures with the stroke order + sounds and do the cards in Anki, writing them out, listening and repeating, and that's it. The rest (long/double/etc.) I'd learn in context. I can't remember how I originally used Heisig's book.

Way back when I when first started my Japanese journey, I learned pretty fast from using Rosetta Stone for a week that romaji was worthless and impossible to understand. To learn the kana, I actually just used a kana/kanji book with the pronunciations and stroke orders, and practiced writing them and saying them in my head during my night classes

After maybe 3-4 weeks I was OK with writing and remembering a lot of them.
I didn't truly start to get better with them until I started looking at Japanese stuff all day, and they're thrown in your face everywhere. Today, I can;t write all of them from memory, mostly rarer ones like (ぬ、ヲ、etc.) but on the plus side the extremely common ones like (に、が、か、の、etc.) are so etched into memory I couldn't forget em if I tried.

Right when I started kana, I still didn't even know what the kanji and kana were... haha. Never heard of SRSing, or Heisig, or knew that the 'net would be my home for almost all my Japanese study resources