If you don’t mind additional input, I’d like to chime in!
We shared some of the same mnemonic devices for remembering how to read the characters, but some differ and I also have a few of my own:
す (su) always looked like a pig tail to me, so I remembered it by the hog call used in some parts of the United States, which is “sooey” (sometimes spelled a bit differently.
ね (ne) looks kind of like a cat with a curly tail, so I remembered that by remembering that the Japanese word for cat is neko.
れ (re) … my sensei said that it resembles a radio tower, and I don’t necessarily see that, but remembering that I was told that it resembles a radio tower helped me remember that it’s re, because that’s pronounced like radio.
し (shi) looks like a girl’s hair, and it’s pronounced the same as the female pronoun “she”
ろ (ro) I remember that this one is tricky, because you would think it would have a little circle on the end because of how it’s pronounced, but it doesn’t. This isn’t really a mnemonic device, but I just remember it as the tricky hiragana.
る (ru) The other tricky hiragana because this one does have the little circle at the end.
と (to) It looks like a toe with a hangnail. Gross? Yes. Effective? Also yes.
There are probably others, but I can’t really remember them right now.
I would also like to emphasize the importance of stroke order (and also stroke neatness once you get to kanji, my sensei used to decimate me because of my messy handwriting), but also just the importance of writing them in general. When I was taking actual Japanese classes my sensei would print out hiragana charts where we could trace the stroke order, but then we’d have to write the character again and again and again. This not only helped drill in stroke order, but it also helped with wrote memorization, because if you say the character each time you write it, it’s going to be seared into your brain what each character is. Charts like that are easy to find online and I really recommend printing them out and writing them out. It’s busy work, but it really pays off in the end!
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