Looking for some advice. I'm finding that using flashcard to learn Hiragana doesn't help much in learning to write, only to read. Any advice on what would help with learning to write it? Or will going through the flashcards EVENTUALLY just get me to the point where I can write and not just read?
are you only going in one direction?
ie: only kana --> romaji/english?
If so, visual recognition alone will only give you a fuzzy recall of characters and is pretty much useless for helping you to learn how to write.
Think about how you learnt how to write english. You've probably went through over a decade of schooling where you write every single day......sometimes until your hand hurts.
It doesn't matter if you don't actually handwrite anymore and literature in your life consist of lurking on Gaf swapping cat pictures. You have spent years building a multifaceted approach to encoding the characters as well as sentence structures and vocabulary in your head using visual memory and muscle memory through reading and writing.
Does that mean that you have to replicate the japanese experience and dedicate a decade of your life to writing stuff over and over again (kana isn't that complicated but kanji can be)?
Not necessarily....especially if you don't actually live there. Life is short and most people have more important things to do.
But it does mean that you have to dedicate a significant amount of time to writing if you want to gain that skill especially at the beginners level. Perhaps a combination of mneumonics + writing could be useful if you don't like writing characters out 10s of times.
Writing also helps solidify your recognition skills because of the multifacted approach to storing information.
Furthermore, learning only through visual recognition can become problematic when you see characters expressed in different forms like fonts in magazines or handwriting. (more relevant to complicated kanji than kana)
Carrying around a pen and paper is a huge pain in the arse.....but everyone nowadays has a smartphone or a tablet.
Ankidroid on Android OS has a whiteboard feature when you can use your finger or stylus to write on the screen and visually confirm whether its correct. Some samsung devices have a wacom digitiser built in which would make your writing look more legible.
Anki on IOS also has a sketchpad plugin....but I don't use it on my Ipad so I'm not sure how useful it is.
that said I did go to school for 6 months and practiced writing during that time, so I know proper stroke order and stuff. beyond that though I don't feel that writing should be a priority if you can't read or listen well, since those are much more important.