Day 3/10: teaching my kids to write Japanese
Written on 2024-03-03
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)

On this third day, I dragged my two youngest off their screens and got them to continue writing hiragana. My son refused to come off his iPad, yelling that I was not helping him find his school shirt, so he didn’t participate.

I showed the girls how to draw the hiragana. Then they worked in front of me. The na (な) character is a tricky one, and Norah’s first attempt wasn’t great. The spacing was poor, but hey, she’s seven! And, she was still excited to learn that nana is seven, like she is!

But, then, they really started accelerating. I thought nu (ぬ) and ne (ね) would be hard, but they really enjoyed writing them and were having fun. And it was fun to tell them the word for cat (neko) and dog (inu) which they can now read and write.

I really get the sense they are taking a lot of pride in learning to write in a very different language. It’s been very rewarding as a dad to see it.

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