掲示板 Forums - Am I misunderstanding how the learning works?

I'm memorizing symbols and their associated sound (by the way i suck at that) and then answering the quizzes about what they are, and then quickly forgetting them altogether in a 20 question quiz the next day.

And then these daily quests require me to type words in Japanese that I don't know how to type?

I'm also confused about making words with Japanese altogether, considering most Japanese words don't sound like a familiar word. Like "candy" being あめ (ame) and then "tomato" sounding like what it is とまと (tomato).

I feel quite lost when it comes to any foreign language, but this is making Japanese seem more perplexing to me than it already is.

Don't worry about the daily quests for now. They are just for fun and aren't mandatory.

Similar to what was said above, try to learn each row one by one. It is completely normal to forget the characters. Repetition repetition repetition is your friend. Mnemonics can also be very helpful! There is also overlap when it comes to the appearance of characters between hiragana and katakana, so keep an eye on that.

You don't need to worry about learning words until you've gotten the hang of kana.

You can do it! Best of luck. ツ

Think of learning kana as unlocking the door to the rest of Japanese. You need to be able to understand them before you can do pretty much anything else with the language, so don't worry too much about any of the other lessons or how words are formed before you're comfortable with kana. You don't necessarily have to master it, but you need to know the symbols well enough that you won't be completely lost if Renshuu shows you トマト and asks what it means -- after that point, the rest of your studying will solidify kana for you.

You also don't need to use the default schedules for kana in Renshuu if you aren't finding them helpful. Everything is Renshuu is built around finding and supporting how you study best, and since kana is a barrier-to-entry to the rest of Japanese, it really doesn't matter HOW you learn it or where, as long as you know it in the end. Some people just write them out over and over by hand to learn them, or they use mnemonics to recall the shapes (in the Kana Chart in the menu, you can see mnemonics other people have submitted). I also really recommend the Quick Draw game in the menu for drilling kana; you can customize the difficulty, so you can use shape hints just to get comfortable with associating the shapes & sounds, and then challenge yourself to remember them without training wheels later.

Keep in mind too that Japanese is more-or-less a language isolate, so the ways it works can be very different from most other languages. The beginning stages of acclimatizing yourself to the features and logic of Japanese is by far the hardest part of the marathon, so go easy on yourself if you aren't getting it right away and give yourself time to steep in the new things your learning. Feel free to experiment with study materials & methods to find what motivates and sticks with you, and you're welcome to ask the community here about anything that confuses you or you need advice on