Easy Kana Workbook: Basic Practice in Hiragana and Katakana for Japanese Language Students

I have been using the Easy Kana Workbook in conjunction with Remembering the Kana by James Heisig to learn both hiragana and katakana. Remembering the Kana gave me ways to easily remember the symbols and this book gave me the means to get a lot of practice. Not only is there practice with the symbols, but also with writing words and sentences both vertically and horizontally. The book also includes exceptions for when symbols should be used for different sounds. Finally, there is further opportunity to get practice transcribing between romanji to hiragana/katakana as well as from hiragana/katakana to romanji. Within a one month period I have become very comfortable with hiragana and am well on my way to doing the same with katakana. These two books are all you need.

Simply put, if you get this book and work through it, you will learn Kana. I'm a busy guy and have had the book for a little over a month. I learned hiragana and am halfway through katakana. No flash cards neccesary, just write the characters over and over. The reading exercises are especially excellent and will have your eyes tuned to reading speedily in no time. A+.

Primarily, this book teaches the proper way to write hiragana and katakana. It excels at this because it gets you to practice, practice, practice and practice some more. Personally, I made photocopies of all the practice pages so I could more easily practice. Secondarily, it covers basic pronunciation, reading, and writing sentances. Just the basics, concepts are explained simply and it provides a good platform for further study. I'm certain the authors intended readers to study other books for these skills. Its one minor drawback is not including info on why machine-made characters sometimes look significantly different than hand-written characters.

This is a great book! Many people who learn the Kana. Think that once they memorize all the characters. They can fully read the Kana. Which is wrong!!!! This is why I love this book. It teaches kana grammar with kana writing, and has plenty of exerices.So by the end of the book you won't forget anything. I really recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn kana. I never thought I could read and write kana, until I bought this book. Now it's off to kanji :(.Also, don't be afraid of kana grammar. It is 100 times easier than english grammar.

This is a practical and useful workbook that teaches the hiragana and katakana characters. It uses a combination of learning by rote practice in tandem with self-test examples. The self-test examples have good variety and range from writing down sentences in kana to correcting sentences that have deliberate errors in them. I found the book's approach of practicing the kana along with reinforcement of what I learned to be an effective one-two combination. It helped me avoid that dreaded "I did it and then promptly forgot what I did" syndrome that some language students tend to have. I am glad that the authors recognized this. Of course, the authors have experience in teaching and their practical experience was reflected in the design of the book.The book does have effective physical design. The lessons conveniently fit on each page and have enough space on them for you to write down the kana exercises. Each page can be easily photocopied onto another regular-size paper for repeated practice so that you don't damage the original book's pages. Each lesson also fits nicely on each side of a page so that you don't get a example that fits halfway on one side and continues on the other side of a page. That is very thoughtful of the authors.Importantly, the book starts out by teaching hiragana as it is the most important of the two kana. I've seen other books start with the katakana simply because it had fewer brush strokes. I think that is a mistake. The brush stroke order is prominently shown on each rote lesson page which is a plus as it makes each lesson page self-contained and useful to practice if you are on a bus, in the library, or elsewhere so that you only need the individual sheets you are practicing with (no need for the rest of the book to serve as reference material).If not for the additional thoughtfulness of the authors in providing an effective physical design of the book so that you can use it in versatile approaches, I would award FOUR stars.