A potentially confusing part of Japanese for some beginners can be their first encounter with katakana.

You may start asking yourself if there were perhaps secret rows of hiragana you missed in your studies? Or maybe you didn’t even know there was another writing set between hiragana and kanji?

If so, please read on and hopefully this little article can help clear things up.

What Is Katakana?

Katakana (カタカナ) is one of three Japanese writing systems, the other two being hiragana and kanji. As a child, hiragana is normally learnt first, followed by katakana and then kanji.

Hiragana and katakana differ from kanji in that they denote syllables rather than kanji, which substitutes for entire words.

Katakana is used for loan or foreign words, which includes many technical and scientific terms. Loan words are words that are “loaned” from other languages. In the example below the word “television” has obviously only come in to use in the last 50-60 years and was a Western invention.

So television, being a loan word, is written in katakana as テレビジョン (te テ re レ bi ビ jo ジョ n ン) but is mostly shortened to テレビ (te-re-bi). You will never see it written in hiragana or kanji.

If you ever stop by any electronics store you’ll see almost everything marked with katakana as the product names are mostly loan words.

Country names, foreign places (as can be seen in the travel ad above) and personal names can regularly be found in katakana. A common example of that is the USA, which is written as アメリカ (Amerika) even though it does actually have a kanji – 米.

Katakana is also widely used in advertising on signs and billboards as the shapes of the syllabary seem to lend themselves to that type of use.

When Will I Use Katakana?

I was once told that I need not bother learning katakana because I would never use it.

I have also read this type of rhetoric around the interwebs and it is blatantly false. One quick trip to anywhere in Japan will show you how much katakana you will see in your day to day travels.

The image above is reminiscent of what you’ll see on many supermarket shelfs and, in the case of this photo, chemists.

Rows upon rows of laundry detergent all written in katakana – imagine the horror when your partner asks you to grab brand X and you come home with brand Y because you can’t read katakana – oh the shame!

It’s really not worth the pain is it, folks? ^_^

Possibly the most important short term reason for Japanese students to learn katakana is that all the on’yomi (Chinese-based kanji readings) are written exclusively in katakana.

So when you move on to mastering kanji, you’re going to hit a very sudden brick wall if you can’t figure out the simple katakana readings to learn them properly.

Get Started

To get you started on your way to becoming a katakana superstar, I have a basic Katakana Starter Kit Worksheet download available below. There are two worksheets included in the pdf download – one featuring just the katakana and another one with the stroke order and romaji for each syllable.

The second part of this series will move on to the extra katakana with dakuten and handakuten, which are the little extra strokes on each katakana (and hiragana) to change the sound of the katakana from ka to ga or ho to po, for example.

Download Worksheet

• Download Katakana Starter Worksheet »

Any questions – please leave a comment.