All the way back when I was in Primary School, I began studying Japanese from Grade 5, completely by chance as the school alternated French and Japanese each year – and as you may have guessed one of the first things we learn’t over the year was all 46 hiragana characters – along with the addition of dakuten in order to turn か (ka) to が (ga) for example amongst other things. To learn all the characters we used visual and descriptive references in order to be able to recall the appearance of each character (For example…. ro (ろ) was “The Rotten Robber Robbed the Ruby” in comparison to ru (る)) – Okay, so perhaps I haven’t explained it all that well… I am going from memories of around 10 years ago here…
However, Danny Choo, an influencial Japanese blogger amongst other things has announced that his Culture Japan brand will be working alongside the Good Smile Company in order to create Moekana, which are essentially flash cards that use visual imagery to learn the hiragana characters alongside creative anime-inspired visuals.
Most of the cards are illustrated by the Japanese artist Ikkyuu while according to the announcement, the character cards will feature new illustrations by DMYO (Nao Shirahane). In the set there will be a total of 50 cards – 46 of which cover hiragana, an explanation card and three character cards. According to Danny Choo you can also use the cards to learn Japanese through games such as Concentration, Shiritori, House of Cards and Karuta.
For more information including where to buy the cards, visit the official website. These are to be released in April 2012 and will set you back around 1,500 yen.
