Learning Japanese Hiragana and Katakana: A Workbook for Self-Study

This is a great workbook for practicing your strokes. If you need mnemonics to help learn your characters, you will need to look elsewhere. This book is geared toward improving your writing skills, not learning the characters. The nice thing about this book is that not only does it show how the character should look in brush and also pencil, it also shows the historical derivation of the character which is nice to see. There is plenty of room for practice although I used separate sheets so as not to fill up the book. After each group of 10 characters it has several pages of practice words combining what you have learned up to this point which is a nice review. It has the words in romaji as well as written in Hiragana/Katakana so you can either copy if you're working on your penmanship (pencilmanship?), or you can cover the Japanese and look at only the Romaji to practice your character recall. There are also a number of pages with very thorough explanation of the different points in pronunciation, etc. Highly recommended.

well i dont think it should be used as the main way to learn the kana.. i think this should be used with Japanese Katakana for Beginners: First Steps to Mastering the Japanese Writing System (Tuttle Language Library) (Japanese Edition) and Japanese Hiragana for Beginners: First Steps to Mastering the Japanese Writing System (Japanese Edition) definitely great practice.. plus its got quite a few vocab words in it..

An excellent workbook. Introduces the characters in an easy-to-grasp way and in a sensible order. Explains the derivation of the characters from kanji and gives plenty of ways to practice them.

I am taking Japanese and needed some extra practice with Hiragana and Katakana. This is exactly what I was looking for. It even has a part where you have to figure out if you are suppose to write in Katakana or Hiragana! It also has empty blocks in the back just for un guided practice...so you don't have to use you notebook paper for more practice! When my Japanese teacher saw me with the book he himself said that it is a great system....my thought...........why isn't it being used in the college!?! This book company sells other great books for learning Japanese as well.