Learnining Katakana

Below you will find the basic Katakana table. Katakana is a phonetic alphabet usually used to represent what are commonly named ‘loan words’ from other languages. While the majority of ‘Japanese’ words are represented by the other phonetic alphabet, hiragana (and of course by kanji - 漢字), common words such as ‘stereo’ (ステレオ)and ‘clinic’ (クリニック) will be represented in katakana.

Table 2 displays the Katakana representation of voiced consonants using two small vertical lines or a small circle. For example “ ハ ” (ha) becomes “ バ ” (ba) and then “ パ ” (pa) using the symbols. This doesn’t apply to every character so please look at table 2 carefully.

Table 3 displays the use of “ya”, “yu” or “yo” in combination with other characters. When reading or writing these combinations be aware that the “ya”, “yu” or “yo” is represented about half the size of the preceding character.