Writing Japanese Katakana

This is an introductory guide and workbook to writing Japanese Katakana. Anybody who is able to master English, with its irregular spellings and idiosyncratic pronunciations, is more than equipped to master written Japanese. The hiragana and katakana syllabaries are purely phonetic characters, which function much like the letters of the English alphabet. In this respect, kana are quite different from kanji characters, which are based on Chinese ideographs and which represent ideas. The katakana syllabary is used primarily to represent borrowed words (from languages other than Chinese), although it is also used for botanical names and is sometimes used in place of hiragana or kanji for emphasis. In some ways, the use of katakana in Japanese parallels the use of italics in English. Writing practice is the most effective method of mastering written Japanese, and the large open format of this workbook is designed to invite the student to pick up a pencil and start writing.