How I'm teaching my kids Japanese in ten days
Written on 2024-02-30
Hi, I'm Chris Dawson a dad and writer from Portland, OR, now living in Florida. My book is Building Tools with GitHub from O'Reilly. I'm an inventor, have started several companies and worked for several non-startups like Apple and eBay. I am sometimes available for hire as a consultant or part time contributor.

(I’m documenting teaching my kids to write Japanese hiragana in ten days. The entire series can be found at #10days4hiragana and this is the last post, and the kana project at kana.public.do)

In ten days I’m taking my three kids to Japan. Before we go, I want them to learn the Japanese phonetic characters: hiragana. So, I built a little app that animates the hiragana and makes printable worksheets for them to practice. They can use these as one-sheet, or I plan to chop them up into flashcards and use a variation of spaced repetition to help them learn. I wanted this to be something they can do offline and with a pen: there is lots of evidence coming to light recently about the importance of handwriting for memorization (https://archive.ph/q0uAI and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37909756) and I wanted to make something where it was easy for them to practice on a piece of paper and pencil, not on a web app (though it works there as well if they wanted to use an iPad or something).

The project can be viewed here: https://kana.public.do. Or, you can get the code here: https://extrastatic.dev/xrdawson/kana-practice. This is code I extracted from another project which helps you learn Japanese by reading Japanese classical books with a clever combination of animated kanji and flashcards/spaced-repetition. You can see a work in progress sample at Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro on community.public.do (be sure to expand the kanji and click on them!), or sign up to be notified when it is ready here:

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A brief technical note: this is a simple svelte app. Most of the heavy lifting comes from the incredible KanjiVG project http://kanjivg.tagaini.net/ which provides beautiful kanji (and all the hiragana as well) with annotated stroke order. Combining this with the animejs project and you can have fun making animated kanji or hiragana. It was a little tricky animating SVG loaded over the network, but it was a fun project to explore SVG and JavaScript and Kanji.

Last week I printed out the pages and handed them to them in the car as I’m driving them to school. They promptly ignored them and threw them on the floor. Looking back on that, I didn’t set the kids up to succeed. I assumed showing them a page with the stroke order clearly marked would be enough. My takeaway is that it was intimidating to them even with these hints.

Today I took a different tactic which seems obvious in hindsight: demonstrating it myself before they do it. Before driving back from the trampoline park, I took out one of the sheets and showed them how to draw the hiragana. That was helpful for them to gain confidence in a new way of writing. After that, they were off to the races, and it brought tears to my eyes to see them writing Japanese. There were varying levels of perfection, and some tears of frustration on their part, but I kept repeating: “That’s why we practice!” It was so rewarding to see them try this experiment.

I also told them the story about living in Japan and my first embarassing kanji fail. I went to Japan cold turkey in high school, knowing no Japanese. After being there for several weeks and studying every night, I gradually progressed to practicing a few kanji. I then proudly went in to my Japanese high school to show off what I had done. To my utter mortification, my Japanese friends looked at my characters and immediately criticized my stroke order. I never realized how important it was, and I never forgot it.

That was a good segueway to discuss how in Japanese art you often see Japanese characters that are very obscure, but you can often make them out by the stroke order. With an ink quill, you only get one long stroke; the brush never leaves the page. It is really important to follow the prescribed order of strokes. You can see a line that goes on forever and understand that it can be broken into a dozen smaller strokes to create the modern kanji. It’s beautiful and structured, and a facet of Japanese art I never understood until I knew how kanji were composed.

Tomorrow we will learn the next ten hiragana. By next Friday, when they get on the plane they are going to know all the hiragana and they will know five words per row. That should be enough to learn different names for sushi and other important words. Then, the fun begins because I can force them to talk in Japanese when they order someone to eat. That’s the best way to get a kid to learn a language, hit them when they are hungry!

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Other interesting things:
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Public.DO: read classic books, serialized over email, in English or foreign languages
Read famous books like Kokoro (with Japanese subtitles) and practice Kanji
https://public.do
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