Now that you know hiragana and some basic greetings, it’s time to learn katakana. As you already know, this syllabary is mainly used to write words of foreign origin. Japanese use a great number of borrowed words and thus it is very important to learn katakana. Knowing this syllabary you’ll not only know how to write your name in Japanese, but also understand a significant portion of some day-to-day texts.

Pronunciation

Most of the katakana characters correspond phonetically to hiragana, you can thus rewatch the pronunciation videos from the previous lesson, referring yourself to the Katakana & hiragana cheat sheet. As you do so, notice that some of the katakana characters look identical to their hiragana counterparts.

Special sounds

As katakana is used to transliterate non-Japanese words, some of the sounds that can be expressed with it are not found in hiragana.

Please note that the majority of Japanese speakers can’t pronounce or even hear most non-Japanese sounds and thus, while the following sounds exist in katakana, borrowed words are often transcribed differently, and almost always pronounced differently from the original.

Syllables starting with the letter v are written with the katakana character ヴ followed by a small version of a katakana vowel. However, most Japanese don’t hear the difference between v and b and, as borrowed words in Japanese are transcribed based on their pronunciation, words containing a v sound are transliterated with a b instead.

For example, the word ‘video’ is written and pronounced as ビデオ (bideo), not ヴィデオ (video), and ‘Venus’ is most often written as ビーナス (bīnasu), not ヴィナス (vinasu) or ヴェヌス (venusu). You’ll also notice that, as in the latter example, Japanese tend to extend vowels and double consonants in foreign words.

The sound L does not exist in Japanese and neither is there a way to write it in katakana. All words containing the letter l are transcribed with an r instead (ex. ラテックス, ratekkusu, latex). If the word in question is commonly used in the Japanese language, you should pronounce it with an r. If it is a name of a person, country, or a company, you can pronounce it both with an l and an r.

With the exception of n, whenever a consonant without a following vowel is encountered in a word, it is generally replaced with an u ending kana or, in some cases, dropped completely. For example, ロス (rosu, Los Angeles).

To practice the pronunciation of these non-Japanese sounds, try reading each of the following words, then listen to the recording.

ソファー (sofa)
ウィンドウズ (Windows)
ウォッカ (vodka)
チェック (check)

Writing katakana

Now that you know how to read katakana, it is time to learn how to write it. Print out the practice sheets below and write each character several times. Remember the rules from Lesson 03 as they’ll come in handy.

Long vowels

Unlike hiragana, all vowels in katakana are prolonged the same way, with a special katakana character similar to the western dash.

When written vertically, the line is rotated 90 degrees.

Basic punctuation

Japanese punctuation is functionally fairly similar to western languages including the usual full stop, comma, ellipsis and quotation marks. As you’ll learn later, a question mark and an exclamation mark aren’t traditionally used in Japanese language—the respective sentence types being marked with a special particle—but they can be seen from time to time, especially on the internet. One unique characteristic of Japanese punctuation is that it is positioned differently depending on the orientation of the text.

Full stop

The Japanese full stop (kuten, 句点) is a small circle. In horizontal writing, it is placed in the same position as it would be in English, that is, at the bottom right of the preceding character. In vertical writing, it is placed immediately below and to the right of the last character, in a separate square if using genkō yōshi (see Cultural note below). No extra space is left after a full stop.

Unlike the Western full stop, it is often used to separate consecutive sentences, rather than to finish every sentence; it is frequently left out where a sentence stands alone, or where text is terminated by a quotation mark instead.

Comma

The comma (tōten, 読点) is used in many contexts, principally for marking-off separate elements within a sentence. In horizontal writing, the comma is placed at the bottom right of the preceding character. In vertical writing, it is placed immediately below and to the right of the last character, in a separate square if using genkō yōshi. No extra space is left after a full stop.

Rules for using the comma are comparatively less strict in Japanese than in English. In Japanese, for example, a comma may be placed after the subject (where it would not normally be required in English) at the author’s discretion.

More punctuation

Interpunct

The interpunct (nakaguro, 中黒) is a small dot used for interword separation. It is also known as nakapochi, nakapotsu and nakaten and is sometimes replaced with a double hyphen 「゠」. You’ll see it used quite often, in many different situations:

• Separating Japanese words where the intended meaning would be unclear if the characters were written side-by-side
• Separating listed items, instead of a comma: 小・中学校 (elementary and middle school) vs. 小、中学校
• Separating foreign words and names when written in kana: パーソナル・コンピューター (personal computer), and occasionally for Japanese names, particularly when there would otherwise be confusion as to where one name ends and another begins
• Separating titles, names and positions: 部長補佐・鈴木 (Assistant Department Head Suzuki)
• As a decimal point when writing numbers in kanji: 三・一四 (3.14)
• In place of hyphens, dashes and colons when writing vertically

Quotation marks

As you’ll learn in further lessons, quotations are used very frequently in Japanese. It’s safe to say that you’ll rarely see a Japanese text without a quotation of some sort. Quotations are marked with hook brackets (kagikakko, 鉤括) 「」 or double hook bracket (nijūkagikakko, 二重鉤括弧) 『』 which are more or less equivalent to western “quotation marks”. The double hook is also used to mark book titles.

Parenthesis

Japanese parenthesis (pāren, パーレン) and double parenthesis are identical to western parenthesis and are used to present additional information about the word or phrase which they follow.

Brackets

［…］、｛…｝、〔…〕、《…》、【…】 — These are just a few of the many, many brackets that can frequently be seen in Japanese texts. There is no official rule to follow and thus they are used for all kinds of purposes. For example, brackets are often used in place of quotation marks, as nested parenthesis, and for emphasis.

Ellipsis

Ellipses (dot dot, ten-ten, てんてん) were adopted into Japanese from western languages and indicate an intentional omission or abbreviation, or a pause in speech, an unfinished thought or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence. Sometimes they are also used as a substitute for dashes.

The ellipsis is often three dots or six dots (in two groups of three dots), however variations in number of dots exist. The dots can be either on the baseline or centred when horizontal; the dots are always centred horizontally when vertical.

Space

Whereas in English, spaces are used for interword separation as well as separation between punctuation and words, in normal Japanese writing, no spaces (supēsu, スペース) are left between words, except if the writing is exclusively in kana or with little to no kanji, in which case spaces may be required to avoid confusion.

Wave dash

The wave dash (nami dasshu, 波ダッシュ) resembles a lengthened tilde, but it has many more uses:

• To indicate ranges (5時〜6時, from 5 o’clock to 6 o’clock; 東京〜大阪 Tokyo to Osaka).
• To separate a title from a subtitle on the same line; in English a colon is used for this purpose.
• In pairs, in place of dashes or brackets: 〜〜答え〜〜
• To indicate origin: フランス〜 (from France)

Asterisk

Called “rice symbol” (komejirushi, 米印), this Japanese equivalent of a western asterisk is generally used for text annotations and lists of items.

It’s not a secret that Maru, the Japanese cat, loves jumping into cardboard boxes. But what if he’s confronted with something smaller? Will he give up?

Before you move on

• Learn how to read and write katakana.
• Introduce yourself at the forum and write your name in カタカナ
• Find some カタカナ words in a dictionary and work out from which language they come