Kana (Part VI)

Now that we have finished with Hiragana, let's take a look at the next script, Katakana. These characters pretty much work the same as they do with Hiragana. Be sure to correctly pronounce them and practice actually writing them down too.

• Basic Katakana
• Dakuten and Handakuten
• Small Y Kana
• Extended Katakana

Katakana is used for many things but you will find it more commonly used for non-Japanese words known as "load words". Besides foreign words, Katakana maybe used to emphasis certain work like English would with bold or italic. It is also quite used for many onomatopoeia, animal names, food, scientific words, exclamations, speaking like a robot and other stylistic choices.

Katakana can be quite difficult for many English speakers because, they expect that English words written in Katakana sound the same as English but this is not the case. Katakana has the same sounds as the Hiragana set and adapting these sounds to English words tend change the way these English words actually sound (English with Japanese pronunciation).

Because Japanese does not have white spaces between words, the optional dot symbol 「・」 may be used instead: ルートヴィヒ・ヴァン・ベートーヴェン (Ludwig van Beethoven). If you are using an English keyboard set to Japanese, most keyboards allow you to type a forward-slash / for that 「・」 symbol.

Becareful not to mix up certain characters as they may look very much the same シ (shi) and ツ (tsu) as well as ソ (so) and ン (n), you'll notice that the two small marks have a slightly different angle, then there is ウ (u) and ワ (wa), the first with an added line above (Japanese people also may struggle similarly with English handwriting such as a and d, D and P, n and h, I and l, O and 0, D or Q etc. so you're not alone).

Basic Katakana

Dakuten and Handakuten

Small Y Kana

Extended Katakana