I wouldn’t worry about if it is hiragana vs katakana too much right now. Instead, I would focus on how it sounds. For me, I picture the word instead of translating it to my native language. So for something like アルバイト (part-time job) I would associate it with what my mind pictures when I hear the word in my native language as I say the Japanese word out loud.
Pay attention to the vowels. English has weak vowels, so we get lazy and tend to treat them all as a schwa, but you can’t get away with that in Japanese. There’s a big difference between 平(ひら) “ordinary” and 鰭(ひれ) “fin.”
There's a song on youtube that has the hiragana alphabet song and its super catchy, its a youtube short and I just played it over and over again until I memorized the song
