I'm trying to improve my speed and fluency in reading kana. Does anybody know of any useful techniques (apart from reading lots of kana, that is...)?

Reading aloud.

It really helps when you can hear the mistakes you're making in reading, and can also help you fix mistakes in your pronunciation. It can get tiring to read everything aloud, but if you can grab a manga (or equivalent reading material with furigana) and practice reading a few pages to yourself every day it will help immensely.

What I found is that the more Japanese I learned, the faster I could read kana. This is definitely due in part to the amount of kana that I was reading per day, but it also had to do with the fact that the more words I knew, the more the kana seemed to cluster together. This is similar to how when you see the English word "stop," you don't read "s, t, o, p," but you just see the word. You'll eventually see "ありません," "でした," "その," and so on as single units that you don't have to decipher

What Donbert said. Knowing words and pure reading experience just gets your speed up, just like when you were a kid learning English. I don't think you need any tricks, just patience. I remember being pretty danged slow, but I've gotten a lot quicker these days I believe, especially with words I'm familiar with. My katakana reading is still a lot weaker, just because I see a lot less katakana in any given day.

That said, I guess you could do something like make flashcards (physical or virtual) of kana strings (preferably in common kana words) that you actually 'flash' at yourself (only look for a second), then have to spell out from memory what you were able to catch.

I wouldn't necessarily advise against reading aloud, but it's not something I personally do as I fear that reciting Japanese aloud often, when not immediately following and imitating a native speaker, would set me into habits of bad accent at the moment as I fall back on what I already 'know' about Japanese sounds (and just sound in general), which if we're being honest, still isn't nearly enough. As well as bad rhythm and pitch habits (even more treacherous).
But eh, who knows.

Read read read read read

I would wait on reading aloud until you're more confident in the flow of the language (which you get by listening listening listening).

Along with lots of reading, lots of writing. Copying out correct sentences is a good way to get used to a new script.

yes, just read.

since the begining of this year i have only read 8 books eacht of 30 about pages in kana but mine reading speed increased multifold.
i advice getting japanese graded readers or children boosk trough ebay

In my experience, reading aloud doesn't interfere with your 'normal speaking'.

I only realised this last year with my family in South Africa. When I'm speaking normally, my English sounds fine (I know you can hear I'm Dutch... Which is annoying but I just don't speak English often enough to fix that)... But when I'm reading something out loud, it's 100 times more obvious I'm Dutch. My rhythm is just off when I'm reading, I mispronounce words I would certainly get right when I'm just talking with someone...

I don't think it would hurt a lot to read things out loud. I'm not sure how much it would help though...

When reading manga I tend to read most things out loud... At times when I can't understand a word, just saying it can make it click and suddenly I do understand it... And it's fun to 'voice act' for the characters (リナリ、大丈夫？ (I'm reading D.Gray-man).

But yes, read a lot and other than that, the 'learn kana' program helped me a lot when I was just starting out. Other than that, katakana is still more annoying and only now am I starting to read it a bit faster (after a year, go figure.), and only because I'm playing Tales of Phantasia and games tend to use more katakana (if only for the items with English names or whatever). So that helps a lot.　

I'm confident in my pronunciation ability because of all the Japanese I have listened to for years. I've found it a little offputting, though, when going through Remembering The Kana, because Heisig, in the effort to teach beginners the correct sounds, gave pronunciations and spellings that are much more Western. For me, it's been difficult to associate へ　with 'haystack' and ね with 'nametag', for example, because the sounds are different! I do agree with the above advice, and I read read read read read, as much as possible. ：）

I'm pretty much fluent with kana as I am with english words. I got this way from reading japanese short novels with rikai-chan (for kanji/unknown words)

I found that I learned kana but when I went to read words (cos I had learnt single 'letter' flashcards) it was a really hard step.

On radio 4 a few years back there was a piece on morse code people during the war. They said that what you have to do is look at which letters you are slowest with (lest frequent) and practice them to death. Because they are what slow you down/let you down.

Kana fluency comes automatic as you read and learn Japanese. A good way is to write a lot. Just sit down and write a short story using kana. When you don't know words or grammar, just skip it and keep writing. That way you'll become "fluent" in writing kana as well, and the better you can write kana, the better you can read it.

Well, reading the kanas came so easy to me after so little practice. I guess that's because japanese vowels are very very close to portuguese.
You english natives have so many vowels that it might be difficult to chose them!

donbert Wrote:What I found is that the more Japanese I learned, the faster I could read kana. This is definitely due in part to the amount of kana that I was reading per day, but it also had to do with the fact that the more words I knew, the more the kana seemed to cluster together. This is similar to how when you see the English word "stop," you don't read "s, t, o, p," but you just see the word. You'll eventually see "ありません," "でした," "その," and so on as single units that you don't have to decipher

Only problem with this is Katakana. I can read Hiragana just as fast as English. However, Hiragana is usually (as you said) just a cluster of characters representing a word that you easily speed read. However, Katakana is much more difficult. In order to write foreign words, Katakana is the first choice, resulting in any name outside of Asia.

クリストファー・スティベン・ペイン (my name)can be difficult to read. Not to mention Katakana makes use of the small ぁぃぅぇぉ as well as ヴ. It's just more difficult to read.