A New Way to Learn Hiragana

Today we're excited to announce the Quantized Hiragana deck!

We weren't planning on making a kana deck. But it turned out that the people starting Japanese Foundation were all over the place in their knowledge of kana. If you don't know kana well, the early sentences of Japanese Foundation are discouraging and difficult.

Our goal at Quantized is to make learning systematic. To do that, we need people to start at a similar place, so the beginning of Japanese Foundation isn't too easy or too hard. That's why we made the kana deck: to provide a consistent and predictably strong foundation in kana from which to attack the full Japanese Foundation deck.

The Quantized kana deck has a couple of improvements over the traditional format that we really like.

On the front of the flashcard, instead of having a single kana, we have a common word written in kana. On the back, we have native audio for that word. You grade a card correct if you successfully pronounce the word. A new kana is introduced every four cards.

This format has several benefits:

• You get fast. In a traditional single-kana deck, you'd learn to recall the content somewhat slowly, perhaps using mnemonics. Read several kana in sequence forces you to get much faster at recalling them.
• You get lots of practice with the parts of kana that are hard to learn from a chart. When you see a card like いっしょう, for instance, you get practice applying the rules for っ, しょ, etc. And from the native audio, you learn how っ actually affects the sound of a word, and not just that it doubles consonants (whatever that means).
• Because the focus is on audio (instead of romaji), there's no confusion around how to pronounce kana like ふ.
• You get exposure to how pairs of kana sound together. For example, you learn early on that がくせい sounds like "gak-seh" and not "ga-kew-seh". When you later run into these words, which you definitely will, you already have intuition for how they sound.
• You'll get exposure to different fonts. The words switch between five different fonts, and you'll quickly realize that kana can look wildly different in different fonts. (My friend Ved learned り two days ago, and it was only when we added the new fonts that he realized that り isn't normally connected at the top. After that he stopped getting it confused with わ.)
• It's fun! You'll recognize some of the words, perhaps from food menus or anime.

One of the most exciting parts about Quantized is that we can afford to make content that's really good. What do I mean by that? If you're making your own kana deck, it's pretty stupid to spend fifty hours making a deck that you only study for ten hours. But because this deck will be used thousands of times, we can spend tens of hours making it the best it can be. In other words, at scale, we can make learning easier for everyone.

If you want to use the deck, you can get it here. If you want to see what you can expect after using this deck, check here for early statistics, or here for Ved's personal experiences with it.