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About Katakana カタカナについて
What is Katakana?
Katakana is the second writing system of Japanese, which is used primarily for words of foreign origin, and names of foreign places, people and things.
Example:
デパート (from the word "department store", a word of foreign origin)
ニューヨーク（New York, foreign name of a place）
スミス（Smith, foreign name of a person）
Katakana and pronunciation
Katakana also consists of 46 letters. Each letter corresponds to a sound.
The symbols are made up of straight lines, while Hiragana is curvilinear in style.
Click each character to hear the sound, or to see the stroke and the origin.
(You will need to have Flash Plug-in installed in your browser.
If you don't have, you can download from the site below.)
| C / V | a | i | u | e | o |
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| k |  |
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| ka | ki | ku | ke | ko | |
| s |  |
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| sa | shi | su | se | so | |
| t |  |
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| ta | chi | tsu | te | to | |
| n |  |
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| na | ni | nu | ne | no | |
| h |  |
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| ha | hi | fu | he | ho | |
| m |  |
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| ma | mi | mu | me | mo | |
| y |  |
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| ya | yu | yo | |||
| r |  |
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| ra | ri | ru | re | ro | |
| w |  |
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Click each character to hear the sound, or to see the stroke and the origin.
(You will need to have Flash Plug-in installed in your browser.
If you don't have, you can download from the site below.)
