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Mastering that most vital of the Japanese alphabets is a crucial hurtle everyone has to become if they want to truly learn Japanese. I know there are a few of you out there who struggle with hiragana so I have compiled this list of strategies that my friends and I used when we were trying to learn hiragana. I hope some of them help.

1. Traditional Japanese Method

This is how the Japanese themselves learn hiragana. It works, but I warn you, it isn't very much fun. It goes something like this: write out each character over and over and over and over and over again until you know it. You can say the character out loud every time you write it if you like.

2. Pictoral Associations

This is a more efficient way of learning the characters because it's in tune with how the human mind learns. It's really quite simple: look at each hiragana, and figure out something that it looks like to you that is relatedto the pronunciation.

(This was how I learned, by the way...)

Examples:

か looks like an old woman bent over a cane, being chased by a crow. The crow goes KA!

い looks like a pair of EEls.

さ looks like a SAwhorse

へ looks like a HAYstack

and so on and so forth. A friend of mine tried to come up with a dirty image for every symbol to learn them... it was actually quite effective.

3. Internet games.

There are links to several useful internet games in the Japanese Kana/Kanji Lesson one. Go and use those, or search google for more. They can be really quite helpful.

4.Flash Cards

This is good for character recognition, but won't necessarily teach you to write them. Just make a set of flashcards for yourself and keep looking at them till you know the characters. You could try making a matching or memory game as well.

Are there any other methods people have been using to learn? I think you'll find that these work nicely.

I use the traditional Japanese way apparently. xD I learned hirigana really quickly that way.

I did a combo of these. To start they were introduced the pictorial way. (I can still remember some of these. The katakana ヲ　is the front of a 'wo'cean liner for example. That's my favorite XD) We also did a lot of flashcards and played karuto (Or as we called it back in the day, the slappy game. Where you have all the hiragana cards laid out on a desk and when the teacher calls one out you race your classmates to get it first. We loved this game.)

And, as with all things, practice makes perfect.

As far as I remember, no. Doesn't mean that isn't where my teacher got it from though! In first year uni we used the Nakama textbook.

It's ridonkulously expensive too. I was happy I only had to buy the first one and not the even pricier Nakama 2. I thought it was alright as an intro book but I think its pretty weak on the kanji side of things.

Genki would be better I think, heard good things. I think its also more widely used than Nakama and therefore probably cheaper to get from the publishers (Can you tell I worked at the bookstore?)

Depending on which stats class you're taking and what edition of the textbook they're on, I'll sell you my old one for cheap. Psych books I can't really help XD I already sold my 1st year psych book.

xD The picture method is how I tried to learn, along with copying before I lost my only good hiragana book.
; w;

Barely made it past chapter 2... D:

I made up lots of stupid phrases for the ones I was learning.
xD

Like そ was SO what if I'm a squiggle?
xD
It's my favorite to write...