By Jennifer Pineda

Happy Lunar New Year! January 29, Globalize DC attended the Marriott Hotel near the Metro Center that was holding a celebration for the Lunar New Year. An activity that my classmates and I enjoyed was the Hiragana card game, called Karuta.

To play the game one person reads a sentence off of a card and says the hiragana character. After the character is said, the rest of the players have to quickly pick out what character they said amongst the rest of the cards; whoever is first to get it and correct wins the card. The person with the most cards at the end of the game wins. When playing the game the cards had different images for each character. An example was some character was a train, another character was a cat to help you memorize them. I really enjoyed the game. It helped me practice my hiragana and made it fun to learn.

Although it was different from the way I learned hiragana, I definitely would recommend playing the game to learn and memorize hiragana.