Katakana

The Second “Alphabet”

One kana system down, one to go! Don’t fret, you already learned all the basic rules that govern katakana–the second system–without even realizing it. Remember hiragana? Katakana produces the exact same sounds but is written using a different set of symbols. Learning katakana should theoretically take much less time as you already know the sounds, you just need to associate those sounds to some more symbols.  

Until Katsukats develops its own resources for teaching katakana, we’ll use the same resources you used in the first episode to teach you the second “alphabet” as well. You can find links to these pages below.

Tofugu Katakana Guide

This guide is literally the hiragana learning guide, but for katakana instead. A lot of the guide will be familiar to you so you can just read through it quickly since you’ll know most of what this guide has to offer.

RealKana

Realkana makes its triumphant return in the second episode since it’s just as useful for learning katakana as it is for learning hiragana! Just tab over to the katakana section and go to town! Here are links once again for ease: the free web application, a paid iOS app, and a free third-party Android app! If you use this in conjunction with the article above, you will have a solid grasp of katakana fairly quickly.

Before Moving On…

…Be reasonably comfortable reading katakana. It’s not as common as hiragana, but if you run into it in the wild, it won’t act as a wall. Katakana, especially this early on, is really only going to be found in loan-words or place names. So, if you’re not particularly fast at reading it right now, that’s fine. Just don’t neglect it or it’s going to come back and bite you.