Lesson 3 · Recognition practice

Forty-six shapes, forty-six stories

Every hiragana has now been met once. Met is not known. This lesson gives each character a story short enough to survive a moment of panic, and then takes the stories away and asks you to read the character cold.

≈12 minutes, most of it drilling · stroke data from KanjiVG · mnemonics after Tofugu

1.Why a story beats another look

Staring at き until it means ki is the slowest route there is. The fast one is fifty years old and has a name: the keyword method. Instead of trying to link a foreign form straight to its meaning across a gap with nothing in it, you build two short links — the form to a familiar word that sounds like it, then that word to the meaning, by a picture. Two easy hops instead of one impossible jump.

Hiragana is the friendliest case the method ever gets, because the "meaning" of a character is just a sound, and English hands you the keyword for free:

Three things are worth saying plainly about stories like these.

A mnemonic is scaffolding, not knowledge. The story exists to be discarded. You are finished with one the moment you catch yourself having already read the character without it — at that point rehearsing the story is just slower reading, so stop.

Yours will beat mine. The ones below are supplied so that you never face a blank shape with nothing to hold, but a keyword only has to work for one person. If せ is a seesaw to nobody but me, replace it; the replacement is the one you will remember.

Some pairs no story can fix. る and ろ are one shape, differing only in whether the loop closes. No keyword separates them, because there is nothing to attach a keyword to. This is a problem Arabic already taught you: د and ذ, ر and ز, ب and ت and ث are not learned by inventing tales about dots. They are learned by being asked, over and over, which one is this, with the other one standing right beside it. That is what the next section does.

2.Read them cold

A character appears with nothing around it. Four sounds are offered; pick one, by tapping or by pressing 1–4. There is deliberately no play button on the question — hearing it is the answer. Get it right and the drill moves straight on. Get it wrong and it stops, tells you the story for that shape, and shows you every word from the last two lessons that has the character sitting inside it.

The three wrong answers are not random. They are drawn first from the shapes this course has already flagged as confusable — さ against ち, ぬ against め, は against ほ — then from the same row, and only then from anywhere. A multiple-choice question whose wrong answers are obviously wrong measures nothing.

One pass covers all forty-six in a random order, then offers you the ones you missed. Do not sit there re-running it until you get a clean round — a clean round twenty minutes after a dirty one proves very little. Close the page and open it again tomorrow; the gap is what turns a lucky answer into a known one.

3.All forty-six, with their stories

The full set, in chart order. This is the part to print and keep — and to stop using as soon as the drill stops needing it.

For how each of these is actually written — every stroke numbered in order — use the hiragana stroke chart. Stories tell you which character it is; the chart tells you how to put it on paper.