Hey saw your post about you learning Japanese. Great resources for hiragana and katakana. I'm debating learning and was wondering do you learn the Kanas at the same time or do you learn hiragana first. Also is hiragana enough to continue vocab and grammar learning?
All the resources I’ve seen teach hiragana first and then teach katakana afterwards. I also learnt the basics of hiragana before moving onto katakana. Hiragana comes first as katakana is mostly used for foreign loan words. I wouldn’t recommend learning both from scratch at the same time as there are katakana equivalents of hiragana so it could be quite confusing!
You can get started on very basic vocab and grammar with only hiragana. But you can’t hold off learning katakana for very long because to do a self-introduction like “My name is X” or “I’m from [country name]” you're going to need to know katakana (as most country names are in katakana).
Side note: A lot of beginner Japanese resources will assume you don’t know kana well or at all and so put romaji next to all kana. So you could ‘learn’ grammar and vocab without putting much into learning kana upfront. I personally wouldn’t recommend this approach as it’ll hurt your pronunciation.
I probably should have noted in my earlier post that you don’t need to go through all four resources before doing anything else. Rather these are the steps that I did:
Use Duolingo for a week or so to test my interest in learning Japanese.
Continue with Duolingo but also start using Memory Hint to learn and test myself on a ‘row’ of hiragana and then review that row with HirKat.
Use HirKat to teach the additional rows that Memory Hint doesn’t teach.
Start using Kanji Teacher to check that I can remember all of the hiragana.
Once I reached the ‘katakana 1′ unit on Duolingo I repeated steps 2 & 3 but with katakana.
Then I fully completed the kana tutor tests of Kanji Teacher.
After that, I completed the hiragana and katakana self-study courses on Minato.
After step 5 you’ll have a basic understanding of kana and can start using other resources if you like. Step 6 will help you recall kana quicker, while step 7 will help you read words (in particular the units on long vowels and small tsu sounds are really invaluable).
(It's a bit hard to explain without a visual but hiragana and katakana can be divided into ‘rows’ - most rows have five characters so it’s less overwhelming to learn row by row rather than trying to tackle them all at once).
