Katakana 1: ア to ノ

Katakana writes the same sounds as hiragana with sharper shapes, and カ is still almost the same as か.

Katakana is the second kana set. Every sound you learned in hiragana has a katakana partner, in the same chart and the same order, so this is a new set of shapes, not new sounds. Katakana is used for words taken from other languages, like テニス (tenisu, tennis), for foreign names and places, like カナダ (Kanada, Canada), for many sound words in comics, and for emphasis, the way English uses italics. Biology textbooks also write the names of plants and animals in katakana. Menus, shop signs and product labels are full of it, so it pays off fast for travellers.

Where katakana came from

Hiragana grew out of whole kanji written in cursive. Katakana grew out of pieces of kanji. Buddhist monks in the early Heian period, reading Chinese texts, squeezed small notes between the lines to show how to read them in Japanese, and to save space they wrote only part of each sound-kanji. ア is the left side of 阿, カ is the left side of 加, イ is the left side of 伊, and タ comes from 多. That origin explains the look: short straight strokes, sharp corners, almost no curves. The name itself means fragment kana.

Some pairs share a parent kanji and still look alike. か and カ both come from 加, and so do き and キ (from 幾), へ and ヘ (from 部), and り and リ (from 利). Use those as anchors. Others share nothing: ア looks nothing like あ, because they come from different kanji (阿 and 安). For those, make your own memory hook. The Japan Foundation’s free Katakana Memory Hint app does exactly this with a picture for each letter.

The long-vowel bar

Katakana has one tool hiragana does not normally use: the bar ー, called chōon, which makes the vowel before it long. スキー (sukī, ski) and ケーキ (kēki, cake) each have a long vowel marked by the bar. In vertical writing the bar turns vertical too. The bar takes a full beat, so ケーキ is three beats: ke, e, ki. You will see it in almost every katakana word that comes from English, because English stressed vowels often become long in Japanese: タクシー (takushī, taxi), チーズ (chīzu, cheese), ソース (sōsu, sauce).

Look-alikes: シ and ツ, and others

The most famous trap is シ (shi) and ツ (tsu). Both have two short strokes and one long one. In シ the short strokes are stacked down the left side and the long stroke sweeps upward from the bottom left. In ツ the short strokes sit side by side along the top and the long stroke falls from the top right. Think of シ as rising and ツ as falling. Also watch ク (ku) and タ (ta), which differ by one small stroke inside, and ス (su) and ヌ (nu), where ヌ adds a short slash. ソ (so) has the same strokes as ン (n), which arrives in the next unit.