I learned the hiragana through a lot of repetition and memorization. You'll be learning five at a time. Go to this site: http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/Hiraganapro/ and look at the stroke order for each hiragana, starting with the ones on the right side. Look at the stroke order and write it down. Get a notebook and write each hiragana 50 times. Go the next page in your notebook and write all five of the hiragana, one after another, 15 times. Then, when you've done all of that, go to this site: http://realkana.com/hiragana/ and practice until you can recognize them easily. Select all the font options to get yourself used to the large variety of handwriting you'll see. Try to learn five new characters every day or two. When you've learned a new set of five, practice just those on RealKana, then add all of the hiragana you've learned into the mix. Also, the Japanese vowel sounds aren't in the same order as English. Ours is "AEIOU" and theirs is "AIUEO". The Japanese vowel sounds don't change, unlike in English, where the "a" in "cat" sound different than it does in "law". Make sure you watch some youtube videos to make sure you're pronouncing them correctly. Some hiragana also have some stylistic "flicks" that some people write and some do not. It's you're choice of how you want to write them. Lastly, the ふ character is pronounced sort of like a combination of "hu/fu". Knowing that now might save you a little bit of trouble when you get to it. To summarize: 1. Memorize the stroke order here: http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/Hiraganapro/ 2. Write each character 50 times in your notebook 3. Practice recognizing each character in different fonts here: http://realkana.com/hiragana/ That's how I learned the hiragana. It worked for me and it should hopefully work for you too.