Hello Hiragana!

For this month I started to work on hiragana, the first chart in the Japanese language. I haven't started memorizing it yet, but I feel I have taken a big step in the right direction. (Also If you have been keeping up with this blog post, you may have realized the title has changed. It does not have that much of a 'ring' to it anymore, but I had to change is as some classmates complained about it)

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Ok... What did you do?

What I have accomplished this month was writing down all (at least to my knowledge) of the variations of the hiragana charts as shown here:

These are the most simple charts in Japanese and I don't know about you, but I get a headache by just glancing over them. As I have stated in previous posts I am a monolingual person (I only know English fluently) and I never have been exposed to languages with non Latin-based letters, so I feel it will take a lot of time to memorize it. I have somewhat started the memorization process by rewriting the charts on a loose piece of paper, this will assist in memorizing as (I'm sure everyone has heard this fact from somewhere) writing things down by hand have a direct correlation to memory.

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How large is this 'big step'?

This is a very big step in the right direction. Even though in Japanese schools hiragana is taught at the earliest stage, it is used the second most in everyday-life, only behind kanji. Moreover, everything can hypothetically be written in hiragana, but it gets very messy and very hard to read, thus the Japanese people opt to go for a mix of all of the charts. Meaning that hiragana is a very important thing to master before proceeding with learning Japanese.

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Some final notes for this post...

Going into the future I feel that now I have a basic idea on how hiragana works, how to write it, and the different sounds they make. I think I should work on memorizing this to attempt to refine each of the points I mentioned above to eventually master hiragana.