The Power of Context

こんにちは！

Now that I am in the throes of learning katakana, I wanted to update the learning proposal that I made earlier. I feel like I took a wrong turn. So, here is what I want to share with you.

When learning hiragana, I came up with an assortment of tricks to relate the shape to the sound. For example, ら　/ra/ was "ra?" (imagine a Scooby Doo voice making this question intonated sound). I view the shape as an upside down question mark. Another example is ひ /hi/, which reminds me of a large smile. And then there is ち /chi/ which reminds me of an open mouth--I relate this to the Chinese 吃 (chi) which means to eat.

With the katakana, I wanted to connect the letters to the hirigana. This has proven to be a challenging method of learning. Most likely, as I was reminded by my wonderful boss (who is also a linguist with experience in Japanese), my problem stemmed from a lack of context. She mentioned that it was easier for her to learn katakana because, in Japan, many of the signs were written in katakana. That contextual and visual input helped reinforce the learning.

Therefore, I have gone through the list of words that I have learned in katakana--which I was writing in hiragana for ease. These words give me a context of sound-to-character association.

Here are a list of words:
アメリカ　America
イギリス     England              
スウエーデん   Sweden
オーストラリア   Australia
Tシャツ   T-shirt
トイレ    toilet
ハンバーガー   hamburger
アイスクリーム   ice cream

Now, these are just a sample of words, but they help me remember the /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/ and the difference between /shi/ シ　and /tsu/　ツ. This, as my boss reminded me, is similar to "A is for Apple". This context will aid me in the future. It is a lesson that I should never forget.

さよなら！