Category: Katakana

“School” Vocabulary

Hiragana, Japan History & Culture, Kanji, Katakana

The challenges and difficulties of learning a new language are many and with Japanese even more so with its three separate sets of characters (hiragana, katakana and kanji), but I find it absolutely fascinating and look forward to my study time each day. This was one of my early vocabulary lists when I first started studying Japanese:

人 【ひと】 – person
アメリカ人　【アメリカ・じん】 – American (person)
フランス人　【フランス・じん】 – French (person)
日本 【に・ほん】 – Japan
本 【ほん】 – book
学生 【がく・せい】 – student
先生 【せん・せい】 – teacher
高い 【たか・い】 – tall; expensive
学校 【がっ・こう】 – school
高校 【こう・こう】 – high school
小さい 【ちい・さい】 – small
大きい 【おお・きい】 – big
小学校 【しょう・がっ・こう】 – elementary school
中学校 【ちゅう・がっ・こう】 – middle school
大学 【だい・がく】 – college; university
中学生 【ちゅう・がく・せい】 – middle school student
大学生 【だい・がく・せい】 – college; university student
国 【くに】 – country
中国 【ちゅう・ごく】 – China
中国人 【ちゅう・ごく・じん】 – Chinese (person)
日本語 【に・ほん・ご】 – Japanese language
中国語 【ちゅう・ごく・ご】 – Chinese language
英語 【えい・ご】 – English
フランス語 【フランス・ご】 – French
スペイン語 【スペイン・ご】 – Spanish
大学生 【だい・がく・せい】 – college student
社会人 【しゃ・かい・じん】 – working adult
中国 【ちゅう・ごく】 – China
韓国 【かん・こく】 – South Korea
カナダ – Canada
イギリス – England
オーストラリア – Australia
フランス – France
スペイン – Spain
ブラジル – Brazil
メキシコ – Mexico

Katakana: Voiced Consonants and Other Sounds

Japan History & Culture, Katakana

Though I covered in an earlier post all the distinct characters in Katakana there are still a few additional variations and sounds that still remain.

Voiced Consonants

Voiced consonants are consonant sounds that require creating a vibration in your throat. A number of consonant sounds in Katakana can be changed to their voiced counterpart by adding two small dashes to the upper-right corner of the character; namely the “k”, “s”, “t”, and “h” consonant sounds. There is also a semi-voiced consonant sound “p”, which is created by putting a small circle in the upper-right corner of the “h” characters.

Y-vowel sounds

A consonant can precede the three y-sounds: (ャ), (ュ ) or (ョ). This is done by attaching a small, half-size version of the y-sounds to the consonant+i sounds as you can see in the table below.

Hard Consonant Sounds

While no single letter ends in a consonant sound except (ん), Japanese does have a way to carry over the next consonant sound back with a small (つ). This can be used with the consonants “p, k, t, s” to create a hard stop.

The Long Vowel Sound

Long vowel sounds in Katakana are much easier. You simply need to use a dash: 「ー」.

• ツアー (tsu-a) —> tour

• メール (me-ru) —> email

• ケーキ (ke-ki) —> cake

Additional Katakana Sounds

(ふ) is the only sound that is pronounced with a “f” sound, for example:

ふとん —> futon

ふじ —> Fuji

That’s fine in Japanese because there are no words with other “f” sounds. It’s a problem when converting foreign words such as “fork” into Katakana. This problem was solved by using small vowel sounds. For example, the small (ォ) can be attached to (フ) to create (フォ)

“Fork” becomes (フォーク).

There are other gaps that are filled with this technique. The “v” sounds are also expressed by putting two dashes to the vowel sounds. However, “v” sounds are rarely used due to the difficulty native Japanese speakers have in pronouncing them.

The following table shows the gaps that were filled using these techniques for Katakana.

Some example words in katakana:

Katakana: An Introduction

Japan History & Culture, Katakana

Katakana represents the same phonetic sounds as hiragana except all the symbols are different.

In modern Japanese, katakana is most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages (other than words historically imported from Chinese).

Due to the straight lines and relatively few strokes, there are many characters in Katakana that look very similar.

A simplified chart without stroke order is shown below:

Here are a few samples of foreign words using katakana:

アメリカ –> America

ロシア –> Russia

バス –> Bus

バイク –> Motorcycle

フライドポテト –> French Fries (technically “fried potatoes”)

Practice writing the katakana characters to help commit them to memory. You can do this on a blank sheet of paper or here are some easy practice sheets you can print out below.  Make sure you practice the proper stroke order.  It will be helpful to get in the practice before moving on to the more complex Kanji.

Practice Sheets: http://japanese-lesson.com/characters/katakana/katakana_writing.html