My advice? Play around till you find an app you enjoy using!

That said, many of my students enjoy using Anki and Quizlet. In fact, there are so many apps and programmes out there that I actually struggle to say which is best. Digital flashcards: a quick way to get started thanks to the many premade flashcards decks available.Here are three different ways I recommend my students try out this style of learning: There's a sense of achievement you get from flipping a card (virtual or printed) to find you finally got it right, and more than anything, flashcards are just nice and easy to pick up when you're in between things (on the bus, waiting for an appointment, on your lunchbreak.), giving you a bite-sized study session where you can spend a quick few minutes quizzing yourself. Personally, I think flashcards can be a surprisingly fun way to study a language. It should go without saying that not everyone's idea of fun is the same, so if flashcards sound dull to you, that's quite alright - just skip on to the next item in this list. I hope you find this list helpful! Happy reading 🙂

Once I started writing this post I couldn't stop adding in more and more ideas, so I've made this list of contents so you can jump ahead to sections that interest you: As such, today I wanted to introduce some resources and techniques I've come across that can make make learning kana (the joint name for hiragana and katakana) a whole lot more enjoyable! Learning a whole new script can be a gruelling task at times, with a lot of practice required to really feel confident recognising each character. If you've not come across these two scripts before, just know that pretty much anyone learning Japanese will start by learning hiragana before moving on katakana, and finally kanji - a story for another day! Over the last few weeks I've been spending some time compiling helpful resources for students in my Japanese for Beginners and Prep for N5 courses to use while learning - or revising! - hiragana and katakana.

Katakana flash cards print