kana adventures

I just discovered that Japanese is the language the US Foreign Service Institute ranks as number one on the list of languages most difficult for English speakers to learn, with Chinese, the other language I study, coming in a close second. So here I am thinking I must have been out of my mind.

I spent yesterday trying to suck down as many hiragana as I could. I hit on a good method: write sentences. Phrases like　わたし　の　はは　わ　くのいち　です。　That way I learn to associate them with sounds. If I can't remember a kana, I try and remember where it lives in one of the phrases I remembered. I find them much harder than Chinese characters, strangely, because they don't have the internal logic that Kanji have--no pronunciation, no radical and no meaning. No handy way to remember them. Where I can understand why, say, 頭 means head and is pronounced Tou, there seems to me no organic reason why ま should be Ma. So I have to find ways beside thinking to learn them. Thinking doesn't help.