Hello! sorry this is a bit late, though i have to say that your ask comes at the right time as i just spent the evening helping my cousin learn his hiragana 🙂
first of all, i didn’t really have a set method as to how to best learn them. i think what at did at the time was to progressively learn them lines by lines (as in あいうえお/aiueo then かきくけこ/kakikukeko ..) and then would quizz myself on them. practicing writing them by writing simple words that you already know is good too. for example i associated the ‘letter’ す with すし/sushi and that worked really well with my cousin i would tell him the word and he would remember it haha. sometimes simple is best!
and if you don’t know enough japanese to practice written words yet, I’d suggest you practice with @aidoku’s excellent list (https://aidoku.tumblr.com/post/169192742629/あいうえお-words) of words to write in hiragana, that she even classified with first and next characters, so it’s really great for beginners!
if you’re also starting with grammar at the same time I’d suggest you write the sentences in hiragana in your notes and not in romaji, the sooner you’ll get rid of romaji, the better
making small quizz for yourself is good to know what kind of mistake you usually make, so don’t just re-write them 200 times but do little exercises as well. obviously if you have friends or family that can quizz you on them it will make the learning process more fun.
i feel like i always put the emphasis on ‘have fun!!’ but really it is important that learning your target language feels like a fun step and not a chore for you! there’s a bunch of fun little games all over the net (and apps) to help you learn hiragana too so you could look into that as well. sadly i don’t remember the ones i used to play at the time and there’s probably better ones out there by now.
if these methods don’t work with you, you can also try mnemonics. i don’t really have any for hiragana (except that the ら/ra looks like a 5…). tofugu has a post (https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/) on mnemonics for hiragana that you might already know about. though making your own is a good option too and will be easier to remember for you imo.
i remember that i used to be confused with the few hiragana that kind of look the same like : さ/sa and ち/chi, あ/a and お/o, or わ/wa, れ/re & ね/ne etc. but this problem can be resolved with mnemonics!
i now realized that you asked for a ‘more quick’ learning method but my advice would be not to rush too much, you’ll definitely get there! if you feel like you’re taking too long learning hiragana and that its getting in the way of your studying, you could, yet again, make hiragana part of your other learnings (as in grammar or vocabulary lessons), so that you’re killing two birds with one stone!
that’s all i think of as of right now, i typically don’t blog a lot about beginners level stuffs but don’t hesitate if you have anymore questions that you would like me to answer! (that goes to anyone else too ofc~)
(also i’m sorry about the links tumblr just wouldn’t let him put them on properly..)
There’s stuff for kids learning that can help too. You can put each hiragana on a notecard and mix em up and try to put them in order. There’s puzzles and online games. Honestly what helped me best with both handwriting and recognizing/remembering hiragana was when sensei would make a little drawing with the hiragana as part of the framework. It’s called image mnemonics. For example あ as part of a cats face. (The round parts on the left and right as the mouth, with the triangular area in the center as the nose)
Cinderella “plot holes” I am tired of hearing about
“Why didn’t her step family recognize her?” Because royal balls were basically the candle lit equivalent of clubbing in terms of both lighting and sheer numbers. Even if they were right next to her, they probably wouldn’t get a good look, especially since it would have started after sundown. Also, she was the help; they probably hadn’t looked at her in years.
“Looking for someone based on their shoe size is stupid!” See above.
“Was he going to have every size seven in the kingdom try the slipper on?” Prior to industrialization most garments were made by hand to fit the buyer’s measurements, including shoes. It’s why poor people only had one pair. It’s a lot smarter when you consider that they would’ve fit her like a glove.
“You can’t run down stairs in heels!” I know this is a misconception resulting from historical revisionism and disneyfication, but high heels were not originally women’s shoes. They were worn by men. Women wore slippers, which were basically ballet flats. So it’s debatable.
“Glass shoes don’t make any sense!” Okay first of all, it’s called the suspension of disbelief, and secondly, they’re gold in every other version but Perrault decided to change them to something else expensive.
“She just went to the ball to find a man!” I know this isn’t a plot hole but listen. As the daughter of a widower Cinderella would’ve been running the household finances and acting as hostess if he hadn’t remarried. By demoting Cinderella to a servant, her step-mother essentially guaranteed that she would never escape the house, because the only way for her to escape and maintain her status was to marry well, and no one was going to marry a servant. It was essentially the historical equivalent of your mom stealing your college acceptance letters out of the mailbox.
this was not an analysis i was prepared for, i’ll tell you that
Additional note on 1) even IF it was not nighttime with only candlelight and they did see her, would you really recognize your step-family member at a gorgeous ball in the most luxurious clothes you’d ever seen, after you just left em at home with no assets, no time, no half-decent clothes, and no horses or carriages? Like you might go “huh she looks kinda like our wretched step-person” but that’s it, cuz it’s literally physically impossible for her to even be there, let alone looking like THAT.
3) she is supposed to have the tiniest daintiest feet ever, so she probly actually would have an unusual size by today’s standards. more importantly, the physical difference of the Noble/Royal class is a common theme in fairytales from this time and area. She is “clearly” the rightful princess and a noblewoman cuz she has dainty feet, just as the princess in the princess and the pea is clearly a princess cuz she is so sensitive that she can feel 1 pea through a mountain of mattresses.
You ‘don’t see color’, that’s nice Becky but you know who do:
•The Police
•TSA Agents
• Potentential Employers
•Retail workers who stalk me around the store
•The women of Sephora when they try to shade match me
•Hollywood
•Potential dating partners
See Becky while you rock back and forth muttering ‘I’m colorblind’, just know that doesn’t aid POC in the long run.
*to all my POC keep the list going! Add on instances where others seeing and or judging you based off the color of your skin was inevitable.*
“Your lack of bigotry has no value because bigotry exists elsewhere.”
How can you be so condescending and so dumb simultaneously?
“not being a bigot doesn’t stop bigotry”
stupid
It actually does because of social pressure, one of the easiest ways to get someone to break a habit is to spend time with them while not having said habit and discouraging it…
Ok, hold up.
How the fuck is someone doing their job and helping you find a foundation close to your particular skin tone fucking racism?
And before you say that only PoC deal with it, that is fucking bullshit. WHITE PEOPLE WHO WEAR MAKEUP DEAL WITH IT ALL THE FUCKING TIME!
Why don’t you open your fucking racist eyes before you start calling other people racist Shaniqua?
Literally that bullet point is a joke as I’ve said in the comments. I thought it was quite obvious because finding one’s foundation isn’t racist so I’m saying Sephora workers clearly see my race/skin tone. That’s how they can find me a good match. I never said they judged me upon it;if you didn’t understand you could have calmly asked what I meant. But nope. I prefer Tiana she is a princess after all 👑
If that was in the tags, I apologize. There were no tags on the reblog that I saw this from so I did not get that that point was a joke.
Why does my white, t-shirt and jeans wearing ass get followed around stores then?
Well isn’t that the million dollar question?! I can tell you one thing though: they’re not following you around because you’re white.
And here we have the grand assumption behind all this “white privelege” nonsense.
You can’t begin to actually know that, you just take it on faith.
I have been harassed by cops, because I am white. I have been physically assaulted, because I am white. I have been bullied, because I am white. I have been discriminated against, because I am white.
Some white people, in america, experience hindrance due to being white and that destroys the whole narrative of white privelege.
So they just close their eyes and believe it can’t happen.
The only response that idiots like the op deserve is the 5 Words.
So what? I don’t care.
You obviously cared enough to respond and try to look witty for your friends. If you truly didn’t care you would have kept scrolling, but no you were thirsty for attention. Please use the white tears of the previous reblog to quench your thirst.
I hear this all the time “white people have problems too!” and “I was the only white kid in school and I was bullied for it!” No ones saying white ppl don’t have problems. You just don’t have to think about a lot of the kinds of problems that poc do, cuz they aren’t immediately visible when you’re not a poc, and you don’t have some of the same obstacles. Also when you are a white person being bullied for being white, if you leave that environment you can escape. For poc, you cannot escape it. It’s present in every aspect of your life and interactions.
I have the privilege of being conditionally white passing. What this means is I have had both the experiences of navigating the world while being seen as white, and while being seen as a poc. I see both sides of the coin myself, and I see the disparity in how society treats my clearly poc relatives vs my white relatives. The way ppl treat me is so vastly different when they think I’m white vs when they think I’m not. When you are a poc you have to think about and navigate things that white ppl Never have to think about. My grandpa only ever bought Oldsmobiles until his last car, cuz he knew that if he EVER bought a japanese-made car as a japanese american, it would put him and my grandma in unsafe situations. To this day my grandma doesn’t like to bring Japanese leftovers home to her apartment, cuz she is worried that her white neighbors will smell the food. We would not live where we do today, we would have had more generational wealth, we would have had many more family heirlooms, had my family not been forced to abandon their homes, machinery, equipment, animals, the near-ready harvest they had spent so much money and time to cultivate, and literally everything they couldn’t carry. Had their white neighbors bought what they sold for fair prices instead of less than 10% of the value (knowing that they had to sell or just abandon entirely). Had they not been taken to a mass incarceration camp, without charges, without trial, without due process. These exact things happened to thousands upon thousands of JA ppl, and we still feel the effects today. My family and I are regularly asked where we’re from and told we “speak good English”, and we are never seen as actually American. Ive recently been told to “go back home, you’re not welcome here” unprompted, by a group of aggressive adult white men, while I was minding my own business walking on the sidewalk. Our family has been here for more generations than Pence’s and Trump’s families have. Think about that irony. I cannot tell you the number of times I have had to deal with white guys with “yellow fever”. How many times I have been treated as a subservient sex object cuz I’m an Asian female. The fetishization of my cultural and racial background, and my body. The racial slurs I’ve received from the same exact ppl claiming they love Asian culture/ppl, when I don’t act “Japanese” (read: subservient and compliant) enough.
The black men and boys at my church (which is majority black) know never to get on an elevator if there is a single white woman or child on it. They know that they can’t risk running to the cops to get help, cuz they may be killed. They know that no matter what they wear, how well they do in school, other white ppl calling the cops and cops themselves will only see their skincolor. Extensive objective research has been done just in 2017 on how easy it is for black and white people to get mortgages to buy homes. Overwhelmingly, even when black ppl had a better credit score than the white ppl, they were given extra hoops to jump through and often still denied while the aforementioned white ppl were given the loans.
All poc in america know what it is to be underrepresented and negatively represented in elected positions, in media, in stories, in history classes (yes, we’ve really existed for all those years even in European countries, and even in extremely influential roles that shaped ancient to recent history), in movies, in shows, in commercials, in idle Google searches, in merchandise, in everything. Even in stories about poc, there’s often a white savior and protagonist who is there to “bring white audiences in, and give them a familiar lense through which to relate to the story”. Meanwhile poc have been using the lense of white characters to relate to stories for generations, and its really not that hard to relate to ppl who are different, you all just seem to struggle with it 👀
Disheveled Mess 