Katakana

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Katakana is one of Japanese’s three alphabets. Though on first glance they might seems alien and difficult as the kanji characters, they are not. Instead of representing words, the katakana symbols represent only sounds. They did, however, originally come from the ancient Chinese symbols. Thus, katakana are like descendants of kanji, not having been formed independently. 

The literal meaning of katakana is “fragmented kana”, because the symbols are taken from parts of the much more complex kanji…they are fragments of kanji. And again, although at very first glance to a westerner the characters might seem “Chinese”, they are really just short little angular strokes. So, is there an order to them, like the English alphabet? Yes…two orders, in fact. The old system is called the iroha way of ordering them, abut nowadays it’s much more popular to use the gohuon order.

So, how does a Japanese person know which alphabet to use? Well, in today’s Japanese, foreign words like telephone and television are transcribed into Japanese using katakana symbols. The alphabet is also used for other countries and people’s names…it’s even used for writing out the sounds of things, like a rooster’s call or a doorbell ringing. (This is called onomatopoeia.) 

Furthermore, the katakana alphabet is used to write out scientific words and terminology like plants and animals, gems and minerals, and so on. Again, this is because these are inevitably foreign words. But even non-foreign words like Suzuki and Toyota — the names of Japanese corporations, in orhter words — are often writing using katakana. This might be due to the tradition of using katakana for emphasis, the way we use itallics or underlining.

As mentioned, since foreign words are usually written with katakana, that means that nowadays, even new Chinese words are often written with katakana (instead of kanji, as one might expect.) Ramen being the most common example. Ramen is a word borrowed from CHinese recently, and is spelled only in katakana letters, not with the CHinese kanji symbol.

So is katakana hard to learn? Actually, no. But here is an important tip:

Ask that your teacher write out words whose meanings you can understand. Names like “Yankees” or “America”, and so on. Otherwise the brain starts to tune out and you’ll lose focus.

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