I’ve been learning Japanese on and off for years, but with my plan to go to Japan for the 5th time and staying for 6 weeks all by myself this time from April to May to improve my Japanese, I am now fully committed to finally make a lot of progress! But despite having been in Japan (from Germany) 4 times already, and one time for 3 months traveling the whole country, I still couldn’t even get some of the basics right. And I’m talking about Kana here in particular!
I can read pretty much every word in Hiragana pretty quickly, but I struggle with commonly used Kana, and that’s mostly Katakana! So I set myself the goal to fully recognize them fast and accurately and found that Bunpro actually has the best way to improve my skills there:
The GoKana Arcade Game!
So, I am hereby committing to playing the game once every single day, focusing on both Hiragana and Katakana (since I already know Hiragana pretty well), and posting my results here in order to document my progress. I am not going to study in between, so my progress may be slower, but I have other Japanese-related studies to do and the rest of my daily time will be invested on those.
If you are also struggling with Kana and want to master them, feel free to join me on this journey! Let’s learn together and share our progress to keep each other motivated. 
To make results a bit more comparable, I will define 3 “levels”:
- Hiragana: Only Hiragana, only Monographs. (“46 cards reviewed”)
- Monokana: Hiragana and Katakana, but only Monographs. (“92 cards reviewed”)
- Diakana: Hiragana and Katakana, with Diacritics and Diagraphs. (“214 cards reviewed”)
You “level up” when you had 100% correct on first guess 3 days in a row without looking them up. When posting your results as screenshots, you can mention which “level” you’re on, but it will also be clear from the “cards reviewed” counter. Feel free to compare your stats with others from the same level! But don’t forget that what matters most is your own progress from day to day.
Participation Rules or Notes:
- It is completely allowed to “look up” a Hiragana or Katakana if you’ve tried several ones and just don’t know the answer. I typically do this after 5-10 tries. It’s not “cheating” if you don’t do it right away. It saves you from getting frustrated. Tip: You can just click a card in GoKana to see its reading!
- Post a screenshot of the result screen here every day! And don’t fear being judged, this is not about your current skill, this is only about motivation and personal improvement. So make sure to not judge anyone else!
- Feel free to share which Kana you struggle with most. Talking about it here may make it easier to remember it due to how our brains work!
Let me make the start with my results from yesterday, this is my initial result:
Today, I did my second try and was 3 minutes faster, but also 7% less accurate:
Like I said, I’ve been struggling with a lot of Katakana, especially チ (chi) which I just couldn’t remember and had to look up both times. But I learned ソ (so), which looks so similar to ン (n). Super frustrating! But together, they are “son”, that’s now my mnemonic to remember their relation!
Let’s see what it’ll be tomorrow…
(And I didn’t know you could ask GoKana to tell you the answer by clicking the card. I know now because I had no clue what the answer was.)
I didn’t realize that at all! Thanks for sharing, I’ve updated the tip in my original post accordingly. Saves the need to open a lookup table!
There’s a certain swear word I will try to remember when I come across this again. Fu**, not this again!
I just was like “what was this again?” – I didn’t notice that it’s where I wanted to use the swear word as a mnemonic! Gotta find some mnemonic using the shape … let’s, see … it looks a bit like a food hook. Let’s see if that helps!
Would you mind trying that and sharing your results?
Ps. Once you know the sounds there’s really no reason to use romaji again. At no point in learning Japanese will they actually help you, and lots of people get dragged down trying to stick to them for way too long. Once you’re at a consistent 100% I’d say it’s worth weening off them entirely, but yeah it definitely doesn’t make sense to do this test with the Japanese keyboard 
caught