Learn Karuta!
Introduction:
First, let me start off by saying, relax—while learning 100 poems in a foreign language might sound difficult, it’s not as hard as it seems if you take a certain approach to it, and here’s why:
1) You don’t need to understand Japanese.
You only really need to be able to differentiate sounds and, ideally, read some characters on the playing cards so you know which card corresponds to which poem—but you do not need to know what they mean to play the game.
2) You don’t need to memorize the full poems.
In fact, for many cards, you only need to know a little bit about them—for instance, when you hear “Mu”, you reach for the card that starts with “Ki”, and when you hear “Se”, you reach for the card that starts with “Wa re”.
3) You don’t need to learn everything at once.
If anything, I recommend using the “spaced repetition” method to slowly familiarize yourself with the poems so that they actually stick over time.
Get really good at recognizing the “easier” cards, and play some games where you aim for those cards that you know. Once you get some cards you’ve become friendly with, it’ll become all the more easy to learn the cards you don’t know yet, and by testing what you’ve learned, you’re not only (hopefully) having fun, but getting better and better in the process—without all the stress of “I have to learn 100 poems before I can even play!”.
Getting Started:
There are a few key steps to getting started: learning enough hiragana to recognize the poems, learning the rules, and obtaining a deck and/or programs to help you actually practice.
On that front, there are already great resources to help you get started, so please check them out!
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide – https://learnkaruta.weebly.com/blog/playing-karuta-the-ultimate-beginners-guide
“How to Play Karuta” – https://www.wikihow.com/Play-Karuta
And of course, you can check out the Intro and Rules page on this site as well!
The app I personally recommend for learning the Hyakunin Isshu is http://www.karutasrs.com, as it is not only very well designed, with great poem recitations, a clean interface, various helpful features, mobile browser support, and more, but it’s specifically built around spaced repetition, meaning it will actually help you learn the poems at a good, manageable pace—even giving you stats to help track your progress.
If you’re now thinking, “but I don’t have anyone else to practice with!”, let’s cover that too:
Option 1) Drag some friends into it
Have a friend that’s watched Chihayafuru, or is interested in Japanese culture in general? Part of the hope with this site is that it’s easier to have one big “hub” for learning over having to sort through a bunch of google links, so if you think this site helped you, maybe it’ll help someone else!
Option 2) Look for Karuta players near you
If you live in a big city, it’s possible that there’s already a Karuta group somewhere in your area. And if there’s at least a Japanese culture group of sorts, that might be an opportunity to see if people would be interested in learning it.
Option 3) Practice vs. a CPU
With the new “Competitive Karuta ONLINE” app, you can now simulate karuta on a smartphone, and the AI has various difficulty levels to help new players get adjusted.
Here’s a basic training plan for once you’ve installed it:
- Start with the rule explanation (difficulty “0”), then the training mode (difficulty “1”). Practice just finding the poems and recognizing the ones that you’ve studied—even just learning like 10 poems is enough to usually have at least 1-2 that you know. It can also be a chance to practice both hearing Japanese and reading hiragana, and just 5 minutes a day can be a simple way to feel like you’re making progress.
- Once you have learned over half the poems, you can try doing difficulty level 2, where the CPU “knows” the 100 poems. This means that you need to find the poem a bit before the reader finishes reading its first half, which tests your basic recognition of poems and their cards. This might also be a good time to start ordering/organizing your cards, at least for the ones you know, though it’s hard to give them a strong ordering methodology until you’ve learned all 100.
- Once you’ve studied all 100 poems, you should know about half of them “decently well”—assuming you’ve been practicing them one way or another—and be able to slowly recognize, albeit maybe with some mistakes, the other half. Now you should work on laying out and memorizing your cards more effectively, which gives something to focus on as you also get more used to recognizing both the first half of poems (by their sound) and the second half of poems (by the writing on the playing cards/torifuda). When you can consistently take cards in under 2 seconds, it may be time to look for some practice partners online or try difficulty level 3!
Of course, you can also do a mix of these options too—whatever you feel up to and is possible!
Need further help getting into Karuta? Ask on the Karuta subreddit or Discord! There are even more resources and ways to learn beyond this—perhaps the best one being to learn from the experts in Japan, if possible (though you likely wouldn’t be here if that were an option =P), so just reach out when you need to and people will be happy to give advice if they can!
OK, I can play Karuta, but now what?:
Like any sport or competitive game, you can do more than just play it: engage in discussions, watch tournaments, learn from others, analyze your losses, and improve your own skills—these are just some of the fun things you can do, and personally, I feel that karuta is the type of game that rewards effort and dedication well.
Though English karuta resources and information on strategies, techniques, and more are not very prevalent compared to Japan, this site aims to share what I and others have found and learned through various posts over time, so please stay tuned if you are interested!
With that, thank you for visiting, and best of luck in your karuta games!