Katakana

Katakana (片仮名) are a Japanese syllabary, one of the four Japanese writing systems. The others are hiragana, kanji and rōmaji. The word katakana means "partial kana".

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Katakana are characterized by short straight strokes and angular corners, and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts.

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The main uses of katakana in modern Japanese are

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• Onomatopoeia, letters used to represent sounds, for example hii ヒー meaning "sigh" would usually be written in katakana.
• Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and minerals.
• Transcription of words from foreign languages (called gairaigo). For example, "television" is written terebi テレビ.
• Emphasis, roughly analogous to italics in English. For example it is common to see katakana names on signs like ?? gomi (trash) or ??? megane (glasses), and words to be emphasized in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana.

There are two main systems of ordering katakana, the old-fashioned iroha ordering, and the more prevalent goj?on ordering.

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Katakana: Usage ►



 

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