Beginner's Hiragana Flashcards

     While I was studying the Let's Learn Hiragana book, I was trying to find more ways to commit the characters to memory...  Might as well take a stab at the tried and true method of flashcards...

     The above flashcards might seem odd that I wrote English letters as the main bulk of the card.  At the very beginning this made incredible sense to me.  The Japanese language is comprised of mostly 5 vowels.  Books and lessons trying to teach an English speaker for the first time will list these vowels and their sounds in English.

あ = a   (bah)
い = i    (key)
う = u   (boo)
え = e   (egg)
お = o   (dough)

    So what I did was before I cemented the kana in my head, I cemented their sounds.  A, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, ba, bi, bu, be, bo, ra, ri, ru, re, ro...  I would cycle through the sounds a, i, u, e, o in my head all the time.  Sometimes I would cycle slow, sometimes fast, and sometimes I would replace that one bit in the witch doctor song with a, i, u, e, o....  You know that song don't ya?

     It didn't take me long to get the sound pattern down and then I felt comfortable enough to move on to my next set of cards with the kana themselves

     I tried to use these cards for a while, but alas, being plain black on a stark white background made them not very appealing to my brain.  There had to be a better way to get them to stick right?  I started to think of another method...