W103 - Katakana Overview

In this lesson you will be introduced to the katakana characters. Katakana consists of 45 characters, with some additional modified sounds. It consists of the same sounds as the hiragana characters.

Katakana is mostly used for loan words, such as テレビ (terebi = television) and エアコン (eakon = air condition). As you saw in these examples, the words may resemble the original words more or less. The loan words are often shortened. So, sometimes it's really hard to tell which foreign word it came from, even if it came from English.

Katakana is sometimes also used when the author wants to strengthen a word, to make it stand out from the rest of the sentence. It may also be used, for instance in advertising,  to give an international touch to the message. It is also often used for sounds, for instance in manga. It has also become popular, especially among young people, to use katakana for some words to just make a sentence a bit more fun.

As well as for the hiragana and kanji characters, the katakana characters have over 1000 years old roots. When the kanji system was imported from China, some characters were simplified and used as phonetical characters.

Basic Katakana Table

Exercise

Now, using the table above, try to read the following words. The pronunciation and English meaning can be seen if holding your mouse above the light gray areas behind each word.

a) テレビ - terebi - television
b) リモコン - rimokon - remote control
c) パソコン - pasokon - PC (personal computer)
d) カラオケ - karaoke - karaoke
e) ドア - doa - door
f) テラス - terasu - terrace
g) ライト - raito - light

Drill

Drill katakana in the Vocabulary Trainer using this link.

Practice katakana using this free Katakana practice sheet that can be downloaded and printed out (requires Adobe PDF reader). The sheet can be freely distributed in its original form, so you may spread it to your friends and classmates.

Download the free Katakana practice sheet

So print out the sheet and try to memorize the characters. It may be easier to remember if you practice by writing them down by hand. Just note that all Japanese characters has a rule saying in which order to draw the lines (strokes). It may feel hard to learn the stroke order too, but it does actually help you later to remember the character.

For those interested in the history of katakana, have a look at Wikipedia.

Good luck, and see you in next lesson.

/Johan

Just for fun...

... do you know where the words Karaoke and Pokemon comes from?

Actually they are both words that are invented in Japan, made out of some english words. Karaoke comes from the parts "kara" and "oke". The word kara "カラ" with kanji "空" means empty in Japanese, and is also used in the word Karate "空手", empty hand. Oke comes from orchestra. So, the words karaoke means "empty orchestra". Pokemon simply comes from the English words Pocket and Monster.