On the way of learning the two sound alphabets of Japanese I used another book that I want to recommend. “Katakana for fun” by Noriko Yoneji. It has a method of associating every katakana with an image that is easy to remember. At first I thought the book looked stupid and childlike, but as I began learning I realised that this mnemonic method worked very well for me.

This is the character イ that reads like a short “i” like in the word “indian”. So instead of just learning that イ is “i” I gave the name “indian” to イ, thereby the brain makes sure you don’t forget the sound because it’s part of the word! It is simple, but worked for me. Probably works for children too!

The book also contains example words, whole environments with all kinds of words like a city or different kinds of food on the table.

Another example is the character カ that reads “ka”. Here it is symbolised by a cowboy. Look at the cowboy and remember the sound!
It goes on like this and after a while the mnemonic trick starts to work its magic. That is, when you actually learn the sound of the character the mnemonic fades away like scaffolding not being needed anymore on a building site. When I forget my katakana I often go back to this book to pick up the image again. Oh yeah, that was the salami, the monkey or the Loch Ness monster! (Real example!)

Related articles:
Hiragana and Katakana - Book Review

Links:
Gaijindo Bookstore