Katakana

Katakana covers exactly the same sounds as hiragana, character for character, and is used for a different set of jobs. That makes it the cheapest lesson in the course: you already know the grid, the row order and the vowel order, so all that is new is a second set of shapes for sounds you can already produce. It is also the script you will meet first in the wild, because menus, shop signs and product packaging are thick with it.

What katakana is for

The main job is gairaigo, words borrowed from other languages, which is a very large slice of modern vocabulary. Anything that arrived in Japan from abroad tends to be written this way: foods, technology, sports, brands. The second job is foreign names, including yours and your country's. The third is onomatopoeia, of which Japanese has an enormous stock.

Beyond that, katakana works rather like italics in English. A writer may use it for emphasis, for a word said in a strange or robotic voice, or for a scientific name of a plant or animal. Because it is visually spiky next to the round hiragana, a katakana word jumps off the page, which is exactly why advertising leans on it so heavily.

The grid again, in new shapes

Same fifty sounds, same order, same logic. Read across for a, i, u, e, o and down for the consonant families.

The dakuten and handakuten work identically: カ becomes ガ ga, ハ becomes バ ba or パ pa. Small ャ ュ ョ combine in the same way, so キ plus small ャ is キャ kya, and シ plus small ョ is ショ sho. Nothing here is a new rule, only a new typeface for an old one.

The long vowel bar

This is the one piece of punctuation that hiragana does not share. A long vowel in katakana is written with a bar, ー, laid horizontally in horizontal text: not a repeated vowel character. The bar holds the sound for one extra beat, and lesson three deals with why that beat matters so much.

コーヒー
kōhī
coffee

ビール
bīru
beer

ケーキ
kēki
cake

タクシー
takushī
taxi

A small ッ does the same work as its hiragana twin, doubling the consonant that follows it and taking a beat of its own.

ベッド
beddo
bed

サッカー
sakkā
football

インターネット
intānetto
internet

Sounds Japanese did not have

Because katakana has to swallow foreign words, it has grown a set of combinations that native Japanese never needed. A small vowel after a full-sized character produces a sound outside the original grid: フ plus small ァ gives ファ fa, テ plus small ィ gives ティ ti, and ウ with dakuten, ヴ, stands in for a v, though many words simply use the b row instead.

ファイル
fairu
file

パーティー
pātī
party

チェック
chekku
check

ジェームズ
Jēmuzu
James

Writing your own name

Japanese syllables are almost always a consonant followed by a vowel, so a foreign word must be reshaped to fit. Three habits cover most cases. A consonant with no vowel after it gains one, usually u, so milk becomes ミルク miruku. A t or a d instead gains o, giving ト and ド, so bed becomes ベッド. And since Japanese has one liquid consonant rather than two, both l and r land in the ラ row: hotel is ホテル hoteru, and light and right are both ライト raito.

Say your name slowly, break it into consonant plus vowel pieces, stretch any long vowel with ー, and write what you hear rather than what you spell. Francisco comes out as フランシスコ, Sarah as セーラ, Ahmed as アハメド. It will feel like a caricature of your name at first. It is not: it is your name in a language with a different sound inventory, and using the Japanese form is what makes you understandable.

Reading it back into English

The reverse trick is worth practising, because it turns a shop sign into free vocabulary. Sound the word out at full length, then strip the vowels that were only added to make the syllables work, usually a stray u or o at the end of a cluster. Restore an l wherever an r sounds wrong, and remember that a long bar stands for a vowel that English writes with two letters or with a silent e.

レストラン
resutoran
restaurant

アイスクリーム
aisukurīmu
ice cream

デパート
depāto
department store

That last one shows a second habit: long borrowings are routinely clipped to four beats or so. デパート drops half of "department store", パソコン compresses "personal computer", and コンビニ is a convenience shop. When a word refuses to decode, try assuming the back half has been cut off.

What learners get wrong

Katakana has two pairs of characters that defeat almost everybody at first, and they are worth ten minutes on their own. シ shi and ツ tsu differ in the angle of the two short strokes, flat and low for シ, steep and high for ツ, and in the sweep of the long stroke, upward from below for シ, downward from above for ツ. ソ so and ン n differ the same way. The trick that works is to remember the direction the long stroke is written in rather than the picture it leaves behind.

The other trap is meaning rather than shape. A borrowed word does not keep the sense it had in English. マンション is a block of flats, not a mansion. パン is bread, from Portuguese, and has nothing to do with pans. A ノートパソコン is a laptop. Read the katakana, guess the English, then check the guess, because a good half of the time the word has drifted.

Finally, do not let the second script wait. Learners often finish hiragana, feel relieved and postpone katakana for months, then find themselves unable to read a menu in a country where a third of the menu is katakana. Learn it now, while the grid is fresh, and the whole thing costs a week.

Vocabulary