Katakana

カタカナ — Katakana

Katakana has the same sounds as hiragana but angular shapes. It is used for:

• Loanwords: コーヒー (coffee), パソコン (personal computer), テレビ (television)
• Foreign names: マイク (Mike), ロンドン (London)
• Onomatopoeia: ワンワン (woof-woof), ニャーニャー (meow-meow)
• Emphasis: like italics in English

Long vowels use the chōon mark ー: コーヒー (kōhī), ケーキ (kēki = cake).

Extra sounds for foreign words: ティ(ti), ディ(di), ファ(fa), フィ(fi), ヴァ(va). These don't exist in native Japanese.

Common pairs to confuse: シ(shi)/ツ(tsu), ソ(so)/ン(n) — pay attention to stroke direction!

The green rain in The Matrix is katakana turned back to front, mixed with reversed Latin letters, numerals and invented marks. Simon Whiteley, a designer at Animal Logic whose name is not in the credits, says the shapes came from his wife's Japanese cookbooks and from the kana material his children brought home from Japanese school - and he likes to tell people the code is made of sushi recipes. Hold that against what you have just learned. The ingredient list of a Japanese recipe does use katakana for imported things like バター and マヨネーズ, and the method picks up a little too (フライパン, カリカリ), but it is written mostly in hiragana and kanji. A screen of nothing but katakana is not what a recipe looks like. And シ and ツ are the same three strokes set at a different angle: the falling code is full of near misses like that, which is why it looks like Japanese but cannot be read.