Katakana in a sentence

Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system.

A small version of the katakana for ya, yu or yo (ャ, ュ or ョ respectively) may be added to katakana ending in i. This changes the i vowel sound to a glide ( palatalization ) to a, u or o, e.g. キャ (ki + ya) /kja/.

Both katakana and hiragana usually spell native long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana, but katakana uses a vowel extender mark, called a chōonpu ("long vowel mark"), in foreign loanwords.

In this travel warning, the kanji for "fog" ( 霧 main) has been written in katakana ( キリ main) to make it more immediately readable Katakana are also sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent.

Usage main All Katakana writing (in 1940 In modern Japanese, katakana is most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages (other than words historically imported from Chinese), called gairaigo.

Adding to the confusion, the labels are written in Kanji, Hiragana, or Katakana.

The Japanese language may be tricky for those learning it, as there are the kanji, hiragana, and katakana writing systems to master.

Katakana has a long history, dating back to the Heian Period in the ninth century, when Buddhist monks developed the phonetic writing system from existing Chinese kanji characters as a form of shorthand.

Katakana has become much more widely used, becoming a true support for the modern language (rather than a crutch for making classical Chinese into Japanese, or for reading sutras).

Additionally, there are halfwidth equivalents to the standard fullwidth katakana.

Although often said to be obsolete, in fact the half-width katakana are still used in many systems and encodings.

Although words borrowed from ancient Chinese are usually written in kanji, loanwords from modern Chinese dialects which are borrowed directly use katakana rather than the Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings.

Both approaches conceal the fact, though, that many consonant-based katakana signs, especially those canonically ending in u, can be used in coda position, too, where the vowel is unvoiced and therefore barely perceptible.

By contrast, readings for individual characters are conventionally written in katakana for on readings, and hiragana for kun readings.

Each Japanese syllabic alphabet (hiragana or katakana, see Kana ) would fit, but like several other alphabets of the world they aren't encoded in the ISO/IEC 8859 system.

Examples Here is an example of Japanese ruby characters (called furigana ) for Tokyo (" 東京 main"): Most furigana (Japanese ruby characters) are written with the hiragana syllabary, but katakana and romaji are also occasionally used.

For example, in the word 皮膚科 main hifuka (" dermatology "), the second kanji, 膚 main, is considered difficult to read, and thus the word hifuka is commonly written 皮フ科 main or ヒフ科 main, mixing kanji and katakana.

For example, the English work "Start" used when commenting upon a race is written in Katakana as Su Ta A To.

Generally, though, such loanwords are just written in straight katakana.

Half-width equivalents to the usual full-width katakana also exist in Unicode.