I've been experimenting with both analog and digital strategies for reading haiku in Japanese. When it comes to writing romaji, I can write the haiku on index cards, and I've got over 100 cards now with haiku in romaji and in English. I'm learning the poems, learning vocabulary, and totally having fun! These are the same cards I use when playing Know-Your-Haiku on Zoom, so that means I get to look at the Japanese text (romaji) even when I am playing the game in English.

But when it comes to the hiragana and kanji, I don't trust my handwriting (I'm still just learning the hiragana, and I'm not sure I will ever learn to actually write kanji... but who knows: maybe!). For now, though, I need to use digital strategies for any hiragana and kanji, copying and pasting from online resources. I'm using a spreadsheet to organize this effort, based on the approach I use for Latin and Greek proverbs (I'm not learning those languages, but I am doing grammatical and vocabulary analysis to prepare materials for my students). The spreadsheet is very idiosyncratic and probably would not be of use to others, but I thought it might be useful to share the slideshows I am creating to practice the vocabulary and poems; these slideshows are my digital flashcards.

Here's how that works: I make the slideshow with pairs of slides, prompt and response. I can go through the slideshow backwards or forwards, just like you can flip the prompt-and-response sides of a flashcard deck. I use a Google Slides extension to randomize pairs-of-slides (incredibly useful!!!), which is like shuffling a flashcard deck. I can copy-and-paste slides from one deck to another, just like moving flashcards from one deck to another deck. But unlike physical flashcards, I can make these fonts as large as will fit on the slide... which is very large indeed! They are large enough that I can even read them on my phone screen, which means I can practice anywhere anytime.

So, here's my current vocabulary deck; I'm focusing on nouns because Japanese verbs are baffling for me at the moment. Nouns are easier, and haiku are full of nouns. Especially nature-nouns! My goal is to recognize the kanji, so I have a slide with kanji and hiragana, and then a slide with hiragana and English.

And here's my current haiku deck. For this deck, one slide has Japanese text and romaji of a poem, and then a slide with romaji and English vocabulary – not a translation of the poem, but just the vocabulary I should be able to recognize, which is also bolded in the romaji below.

I'm still very slow with the hiragana and kanji, so building the spreadsheet and creating these decks takes a lot of time. I'm happy when I can add one poem each day! And here's the thing: even just at this slow pace, I am learning so much as I go: I recognize a lot of vocabulary already, and I'm getting better at the hiragana too. Plus, I am very motivated: with every single hiragana and every kanji, with every vocabulary word and every haiku poem, I am so happy about this learning adventure. I wasn't really sure if I was going to be able to do this... but yes, I can!

At a certain point, I expect I will have a Japanese verb crisis (because the verb system is really complex and different from anything I have ever studied before), but I would like to have a solid vocabulary of a couple thousand nouns before I start worrying about that. My experience in learning difficult languages is that feeling confident about vocabulary makes syntax and morphology so much easier. We'll see if this strategy holds true for Japanese!