After comitting over a thousand Kanji to memory, I realized my kana reading speed was pretty lackluster, but I also didn't wanna read stuff in all hiragana like old video games
Since speed-typing is a hobby of mine (both on phone and keyboard) I looked into the monkeytype site settings and boom, it has japanese: hiragana and japanese: katakana language options
I had 25~ wpm in hiragana and 15 WPM in katakana typing at first but just over 2 days doing both for an hour my hiragana typing increased to 50 and katakana to 35
Obviously since there's limited vocabulary in that site it will plateau fast but good way to start getting used to typing with IME/jp phone layout & being able to get used to the pesky common katakana words
If anyone has similar recommendations or have tried this before feel free to share and thanks!
How are you using speed typing to practice kana recognition? Are you seeing the kana and trying to type it as fast as possible using romaji? What does "wpm" even mean in this context?
Hiragana should come pretty naturally. It's used so much that just simply reading should get you enough practice that over time it will become second nature. Also, ideally if you're using Anki or something to learn words the readings for those words should be in hiragana, not romaji. Katakana tends to be harder because it's used less often, and beginner materials don't like using it for some reason, but it'll happen too. If you read any book or play any video game there will be tons of hiragana and katakana that you'll be forced to learn.
The page will show hiragana in grey and as you recognize and correctly type the kana it’ll actually type the word out in white font, or red font if you type it incorrectly. So I guess in a way they’re getting quick recognition practice because the nature of measuring WPM is to test recognition as quickly as possible and then typing it accurately.
That said, reading is 1000% the way like you stated. Kana recognition is not even scratching the surface of the benefits of reading actual text instead of just recognizing random words (what the monkey type website is. It’s not even a dialogue, they’re just random words stitched together.)
It’s a cool experiment but I hope OP is moving to graded readers, etc….
I did something quite similar when I first started to speed up my katakana recognition - I wrote a CLI to scrape my Anki deck and display readings in katakana and ground speed-typing them for a couple weeks. It was pretty effective, but I've also heard of someone else converting all the hiragana in an e-book into katakana and reading that, so that's something else that might be worth trying!
For me I just accept that my katakana reading will be slow - but it's not a huge deal, a lot of the words I'm slow on would be slow for a lot of people even in English, like technical and medical terms etc. Also reading more books improved my recognition
For hiragana - just reading a lot more books helped with that. There would be a lot of words I was used to seeing in kanji, but I'd got so comfortable with the words that reading them in hiragana was also okay.
I didn't find typing helped my Japanese or memory at all. YMMV.
I found writing out the kana on paper (with correct stroke order) helped my recognition. You will note there is a chart that helps with the phonetics.
There was a great app called kanaswirl (by rpglanguage) for ios and android. But I don't know if that is still available.
I used Kana Kuube quiz to brute force through all the kana in a day. If you want to improve recognition speed then its just done via more hours of reading immersion.
The only way you get better at reading is by reading.
In every language you get fast as you stop reading letters/syllables but shapes. When you read stuff in English you're not reading each letter individual, as in you're reading entire words/expressions. There's also things like how as long as the first and last letter of a word are in the right place the order of the ones in between doesn't matter, you can still read it. Wichh is smeotihng I fnid fnaasciitng.