Katakana can be used to write the exact same sounds you learned with hiragana, but the characters are different: ア, イ, ウ, エ, and オ.
Although both hiragana and katakana are derived from Chinese characters, the main difference is that hiragana characters have a more loopy appearance, while katakana letters are more angular and sharp.
Be careful! The sounds of the Japanese language are limited, and quite fixed compared to other languages.
Once you get familiar with katakana, you'll understand how to say foreign words using Japanese sounds!
Practice vowels in hiragana and katakana with Zita, our Learning Content Coordinator and resident Japanese teacher.
As you know from learning hiragana, after the first five vowels, the next rows will be that vowel + consonant pattern all over again. For the most part, everything will be pronounced exactly the same. Easy peasy!
Let’s do a quick review on the upcoming rows, shall we?
Did you know? By changing from what is commonly written in hiragana to katakana, you can emphasize your words and add different stylistic purposes to it.
Next time, write “cute” as カワイイ instead of かわいい, to make it sound extra cute! ა
Last set! You still remember the following sounds, right?
After you master this lesson, you can start looking at all of the weird katakana stuff. It can be challenging, but with Drops we make it fun and effective!
フォーク (fork)
ジャケット (jacket)
チーズ (cheese)
Remember in hiragana how we changed voiceless sounds to voiced by adding two dashes or a circle to the top-right corner of some characters? Good news! That’s how they work with katakana too.
Katakana has some unique sounds to watch out for. For example, in katakana, you can actually turn an ウ into ヴ. This represents the "vu" (or sometimes “bu”) sound, and is used for transcribing v-sounds. But more about that later.
Warning: The pronuncation of ジ “ji” and ヂ “ji”, ズ “zu” and ヅ “zu” are actually the same, but mostly ジ and ズ are used.
Try to memorize the term オレンジ (orange) and ズボン (pants).
The sokuon in katakana works the same as in hiragana; all you have to do is add a small “tsu” (ッ) character to double consonants.
In Japanese words, normally only “t,” “k,” “p,” and “s” are doubled in this way. However! In foreign words, “d,” “b,” “g,” “j,” “h,” “f,” and even “v” or “r” sounds can be doubled as well!
Now, try to read these words out loud.
ヘルメット (helmet)
ココナッツ (coconut)
クッキー (cookie)
It’s actually pretty easy, isn’t it?
To indicate the long vowels in katakana, you have a special vowel extender, that is represented by a dash.
Use it to write down words like:
コーヒー kōhī (coffee)
スーパー sūpā (supermarket)
Just like with hiragana, you can combine characters to make new sounds, but in katakana the sounds can be more diverse.
In addition to the basic combination katakana above (which are sounds ending with an i vowel + small ャ/ュ/ョ), you can combine some of the U-row sounds and the small vowels ァィゥェォ as well. Crazy, right?
You can also add those small vowels to the sounds of ウ, ヴ, フ and ツ to represent W, V, F and T columns.
With these extra sounds, you will be able to write down and pronounce words like:
フィットネス fittonesu (fitness)
ウェディング weddingu (wedding)
See the full list of special combinations below.
Looks rough? Worry not! What's important right now is to be able to read these extra combinations and know they exist!
You'll see some of these pretty often, which means that through practice they will come to you naturally. It's just one of those things you have to use and experience to become comfortable with it.
And just like that, you have all the tools you need to learn katakana. By learning katakana with the Drops Introduction to Katakana course, you will not only learn the 46 sounds, but will practice writing them with correct stroke order using our scripts gameplay.
What are you waiting for?
