Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each (Manoa)

The book doesn't try to teach you in "Alphabetical Order". It starts with "n" pointing out that the japanese character is exactly like a cursive "n" in English but with a longer stem. Similarly for "I" it is like the English character, but the "dot" is lengthened into a short stroke.

Really, you don't need this book to learn the Kana. However, the structure it provides does help with breaking up the rote memorization and the writing style is light and enjoyable. The key phrases the author matches to the syllables are sometimes quite a stretch so YMMV there. All in all a safe bet and a worthy effort on the part of the author.

The book is good but not great. The instructions for writing the kana are clear and simple but the mnemonics just didn't work for me. Most of the mental images seemed so far fetched that they lost their effectiveness after the first couple of lessons. The proposed study method sounded great in the editorial review but in actual practice it just didn't measure up.

The practice words provided with each kana proved to be tremendously helpful. As you learn each kana, you're given a few sample words, each of which contains at least one occurance of the kana being studied. The words only contain kana which have already been introduced and reviewed. It may sound trivial but it ensures you don't forget what you've already studied and it works like a charm.

Also take note that the author's study method involves some serious page-jumping. After the completion of each kana, you have to flip to another page within the book. There's no ryhme or reason as to what page you'll be heading to. It's just random. The purpose is to ensure you don't get into the habit of mindless page turning. It worked better than I thought it would but I'm still unsure of its value. In my case, I found it to be more of a distraction; however, I can see how others may find it to be a great way to stay focused.

I am deeply indebted with the author.
I could review in 44 minutes and in 1 hour 16 minutes.
Rmemmbering the Kanji is actually better, but you can gain confidence with such a tool.
The unscramble page order was a great idea, you can't run the risk of writing automatically.
The only humble suggest: a japanese sensei always knows better, it's his language, after all.. It's even possible that this method is better than a japenese sensei, but never let him or her know ( you need a teacher anyway in order to use properly what you have learnt. It's impossible to do it alone, but perhaps many know better than I ).

Although this is the only tool I've ever used for learning the kana, it definitely worked as advertised. I generally have a pretty weak memory, but the tricks used in this book allowed me to memorize and learn how to write the kana very quickly. Furthermore, because the book does not rely on simple brute-force memorization, I retained the information much better and was able to revisit it again after almost a year of not seeing it in just a few minutes. Finally, the memory techniques themselves have proved to be a valuable asset when memorizing other things.

Although 15$ may seem like a bit of a steep price for such a small volume, it is well worth the cost.