Learning Japanese: Katakana/ カタカナ

So aside from the Hiragana which I have discussed previously in Learning Japanese: Hiragana/ひらがな we also have Katakana as part of the Kana system.

Basically it has the same phonetic sounds as Hiragana, it's just that the characters that represent them are all different. Katakana has sharp edges while Hiragana has rounded characters. Katakana is only used to represent words from a foreign language.

For example:

グラフ

gurafu

(graph)

ゴルフ

gorufu

(golf)

アメリカ

Amerika

(America)

Since Katakana characters are very limited, foreign words do not sound equally the same in Japanese. So katakana will surely be a challenge for us foreigners of the Japanese language. I sometimes cannot understand how those words ended up like that. lol

Let's go through first the Katakana characters: