Katakana (片仮名, カタカナ or かたかな, Katakana?) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet. The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Katakana are characterized by short, straight strokes and angular corners, and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts. There are two main systems of ordering katakana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering, and the more prevalent gojūon ordering. In modern Japanese, katakana are most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages[3] (called gairaigo). For example, "television" is written terebi (テレビ, terebi?). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names, foreign places, and personal names. For example America is written アメリカ Amerika (America also has its own kanji (ateji) Amerika (亜米利加, Amerika?) or for short, Beikoku (米国, Beikoku?) which literally means "Rice Country"). Katakana are also used for onomatopoeia,[4] words used to represent sounds; for example pinpon (ピンポン, pinpon?), the "ding-dong" sound of a doorbell, would usually be written in katakana. Also for "words the writer wishes to emphasize."[5] Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and minerals, are also commonly written in katakana. Katakana are also often, but not always, used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example Suzuki is written スズキ, and Toyota is written トヨタ. Katakana are also used for emphasis, especially on signs, advertisements, and hoardings (i.e., billboards). For example, it is common to see ココ koko ("here"), ゴミ gomi ("trash") or メガネ megane ("glasses"), and words to be emphasized in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the European usage of italics. Pre-World War II official documents mix katakana and kanji in the same way that hiragana and kanji are mixed in modern Japanese texts, that is, katakana were used for okurigana and particles such as wa or o. Katakana were also used for telegrams in Japan before 1988, and for computer systems - before the introduction of multibyte characters - in the 1980s. Most computers in that era used katakana instead of kanji and/or hiragana for output. Although words borrowed from ancient Chinese are usually written in kanji, loanwords from modern Chinese dialects which are borrowed directly rather than using the Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings, are often written in katakana. Examples include: マージャン mājan ("mahjong"); Mandarin: 麻將/麻雀 májiàng ウーロン茶 ūroncha ("Oolong tea"); Mandarin: 烏龍茶 wūlóng チャーハン chāhan ("fried rice"); Mandarin: 炒飯 chǎofàn チャーシュー chāshū ("barbecued pork"); Cantonese: 叉焼 cha siu シューマイ shūmai (a kind of dim sum); Cantonese: 焼売 siu maai. The very common Chinese loanword ラーメン rāmen is rarely written with its kanji 拉麺. There are rare cases where the opposite has occurred, with kanji forms created from words originally written in katakana. An example of this is コーヒー kōhī, ("coffee"), which can be alternatively written as 珈琲. This kanji usage is occasionally employed by coffee manufacturers or coffee shops for novelty. Katakana are sometimes used instead of hiragana as furigana to give the pronunciation of a word written in Roman characters, or for a foreign word, which is written as kanji for the meaning, but intended to be pronounced as the original. Katakana are also sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent, by foreign characters, robots, etc. For example, in a manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot may be represented by, for example, コンニチワ konnichiwa ("hello") instead of the more usual hiragana こんにちは konnichiwa. Katakana are also used to indicate the on'yomi (Chinese-derived readings) of a kanji in a kanji dictionary. Some Japanese personal names are written in katakana. This was more common in the past, hence elderly women often have katakana names. It is very common to write words with difficult-to-read kanji in katakana. This phenomenon is often seen with medical terminology. For example, in the word 皮膚科 hifuka ("dermatology"), the second kanji, 膚, is considered difficult to read, and thus the word hifuka is commonly written 皮フ科 or ヒフ科, mixing kanji and katakana. Similarly, difficult-to-read kanji such as 癌 gan ('cancer') are often written in katakana or hiragana. Katakana is also used for traditional musical notations, as in the Tozan-ryū of shakuhachi, and in sankyoku ensembles with koto, shamisen, and shakuhachi.
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Sounds like when the animaniacs did their A E I O U bit :/
happybunnyntx 5 months ago
This sounds shit. This never is a Japanese language.
ArturoYamashita 6 months ago
these tutorial really have big help to those who still learning katakana...thank you a lot!
kiby2008 8 months ago
foreign and borrowed words is katakana..
jjcjumong 11 months ago
isnt the character for "yu" wrong on this vid?? i thought it was a half of the character for yo, the character on here shows the same one for tsu...
18Kauri 11 months ago
thanks for the video ^^
kurumichan92 1 year ago
the soccer I thought they said sukka like sucker
KiyaClub 1 year ago
@zocurtis Katakana is used mainly to write word in other languages. So basically When they say oranges, it really does mean oranges but they put it in a way so that a japanese person would be able to read and pronounce it
dominicancoolguy 1 year ago
@zocurtis
Words in this video are all written in Katakana, which is usually used when describing "loan word".
For example, when curtain was introduced to Japan, word "カーテン" was made.
So this word is more or less similar to its original pronunciation.
mydearcassandra 1 year ago
muito legal mais kd a traduçao portuguese rs
lendervaul 2 years ago