Hiragana in 8 hours

This post is written by Ved

Five days ago, I decided to learn Japanese. I didn’t know anything about the language--even when I watch anime, I prefer dubs. I work on Quantized with my friend Robert, and I was curious to test out the new Hiragana deck.

On day one, I expected to do twenty cards. I ended up doing 365 and finishing the deck. Why? The deck follows the format of introducing a new letter, followed by several words which use that letter in combination with the other letters you’ve already learned. Reviews are correct if you properly pronounce the front of the card. Because of this, I made rapid and discernible progress, which felt addictive. Sometimes, I’d even recognize a pronunciation of a word that frequently occurs in anime, like “oneesan”.

Immediately after my reviews, I did a quiz where I pronounced 100 random Japanese words. On day one, I finished the quiz in 883 seconds. While my pronunciation was mostly correct, I mixed up a few common kana like る (ru) or ろ (ro). These kana had been introduced towards the end of the deck, so they didn’t get enough review time. We solved the issue by adding extra cards to guarantee enough reviews for each kana. With a grasp on kana, I started studying simple Japanese sentences like それは分かる (sore wakaru / I understand that).

Day two was a grind. I woke up nursing a hangover 365 reviews large with a mandatory 50 shots of extra cards slapped onto the end. Nevertheless, I finished almost an hour faster.

I finished my day two quiz in 486 seconds. I also stopped getting confused between る and ろ, and I figured out the deal with ち (chi) and ら (ra). Tricky bastards. Now I was struggling because the quiz used a different font than the deck. We decided making each card use 1 of 5 different Japanese fonts would fix the issue.

Day three was the toughest. Japanese fonts are varied--the kana “ri” can be written in two ways. Having to learn new ways to write existing kana made me 10% less accurate while doing reviews. However, the variations forced me to recognize the fundamental structure of a kana instead of relying on font-specific gimmicks.

By day five, I was doing reviews at the rate of 1 word every 5 seconds with a 93% accuracy rate. This felt quite good for eight hours of review time.

I finished the day five quiz in 329 seconds--over twice as fast as day one.

The Hiragana deck felt like an intense, worthwhile use of my time. While I did spend eight hours over five days doing reviews, 70% of my time was concentrated in the first two days, so I wasn’t getting hammered everyday. And being able to pronounce Japanese sentences after day one was a fun and unexpected outcome.