Katakana and Your First Kanji

What katakana is for

Katakana covers exactly the same sounds as hiragana — nothing new to pronounce, only new shapes to recognise. So why does Japanese keep two parallel syllabaries? Because they have different jobs. You'll see katakana used for:

• Loanwords — words borrowed from other languages: ピザ (piza, pizza), ケーキ (kēki, cake), バター (batā, butter). Thousands of everyday words work like this.
• Foreign names and places — アメリカ (amerika, America), and your own name when you write it in Japanese.
• Onomatopoeia — Japanese is full of sound words, often written in katakana: ワンワン (wanwan, woof woof), ドキドキ (dokidoki, a pounding heart).
• Emphasis — much like italics in English, a word can be switched to katakana to make it pop. Menus and adverts do this constantly.

For a learner, katakana pays for itself immediately: a huge share of katakana words are English in disguise, so once you can sound them out, you can often guess the meaning for free.

The katakana chart (gojūon)

The 46 basic katakana sit in the same gojūon ("fifty sounds") grid as hiragana. If you can recite あいうえお, you already know the order — only the shapes change. Katakana strokes are straight and angular where hiragana curves.

Watch the two notorious look-alike pairs: シ (shi) vs ツ (tsu), and ソ (so) vs ン (n). In シ and ン the short strokes lie flat and the long stroke sweeps up from the bottom left; in ツ and ソ the strokes stand upright and the long stroke is drawn down from the top. (ヲ is the katakana を — you'll almost never see it in real text.)

The same two marks you know from hiragana work here too: the double strokes (゛) voice a consonant — カ ka becomes ガ ga, サ becomes ザ za, タ becomes ダ da, ハ becomes バ ba — and the small circle (゜) makes the p-row: パ pa. Small ャ, ュ, ョ attach to i-column kana for blended sounds: シャ sha, チョ cho, ジュ ju. Katakana also has extra combinations invented for foreign sounds that hiragana rarely needs: ファ fa, フィ fi, ティ ti, ウィ wi — which is how マフィン (mafin, muffin) and パーティー (pātī, party) get spelled.

Long vowels with ー

Katakana marks long vowels with a simple bar: ー, the chōonpu. Whatever vowel comes before it is held for an extra beat — カー is kā, キー is kī. (Hiragana doubles the vowel instead, as in おかあさん, so the bar is a katakana speciality.) Vowel length changes meaning in Japanese, so give it its full beat: ビル biru is a building, but ビール bīru is a beer.

Reading practice: small ッ and friends

Two more katakana tricks and you can read anything: a small ッ doubles the consonant after it (a sharp little pause, just like small っ in hiragana), and small ャュョ or small vowels create blended sounds. Sound out each word before checking the romaji — spotting the English hiding inside katakana is a skill in itself.

What kanji actually are

Kanji are characters borrowed from Chinese, and they work differently from kana: each one carries meaning, not just sound. 水みず means "water" however it happens to be pronounced — and that "however" is the part that surprises beginners, because most kanji have at least two readings.

• 音読おんよみ (on'yomi) — the reading borrowed from Chinese along with the character, usually written in katakana in dictionaries. On readings dominate in compound words: the スイ in 水曜日すいようび (Wednesday).
• 訓読くんよみ (kun'yomi) — the native Japanese word the character was attached to, written in hiragana in dictionaries. Kun readings appear when a kanji stands alone or with kana endings: water by itself is 水みず.

Why the duplication? When Japan imported the characters, it kept the Chinese-style pronunciations and mapped the symbols onto existing Japanese words — so both readings survived. Some characters were even borrowed more than once, in different centuries, picking up an extra on reading each time.

The good news: you don't need to memorise reading lists. Learn whole words — にほん, すいようび, みず — and the readings come along for free. Japan's official list has 2,136 everyday kanji, but the JLPT N5 expects only around 100, and you're about to meet nine of the most common.

Your first nine kanji

On readings (Chinese-derived) are shown in katakana and kun readings (native Japanese) in hiragana, following dictionary convention. Kana in brackets are okurigana — the endings written after the kanji.