Lesson 8 of 12
Kana Sprint 8 — the second alphabet
about 6 minutes
After this lesson you can
- Read katakana for a sound already known in hiragana.
- Tell シ from ツ and ソ from ン.
- Read the katakana words already seen in Foundations: スタッフ, コーヒー, メニュー.
Words this lesson teaches
- スタッフ
- staff — su-(pause)-ta-fu, the sign on the door in Foundations 0
- コーヒー
- coffee — ko-o-hi-i, four beats
- メニュー
- menu — me-nyu-u
- シャツ
- shirt — sha-tsu, and it contains both of the twins
- テスト
- a test — te-su-to
What it explains
Not a second language, a second font
Katakana encodes exactly the same 46 sounds as hiragana, in the same grid, with the same two dots and small circle and the same shrunken ャュョ and ッ. Nothing you learned in the first seven sprints is wasted or changed. What differs is only which one gets used: hiragana for Japanese words and grammar, katakana for words borrowed from other languages, for many company and product names, and sometimes for emphasis the way italics work in English.
Why the shapes are so much straighter
Hiragana came from cursive writing and is full of loops. Katakana came from taking one piece off a character and using it as shorthand, so it is short, straight and angular. That is also why so many katakana look like fragments of each other: they were fragments. It is worth knowing because it explains why the confusable pairs are confusable, rather than making it feel like bad luck.
The four to spend your time on
シ, ツ, ソ and ン. Everything else in the chart you will pick up by reading. These four you will not, because they are wrong in a way that still produces a plausible-looking word — mistaking シャツ for a word starting with tsu does not look like an error, it looks like a word you do not know. If you learn to check the direction of the long stroke now, you will not spend the next year guessing.