Lesson 9 · カタカナ — finishing the chart

The last twenty-one, and the kanji still showing through

Twenty-one characters finish the second script — and then the marks, the small kana and the long-vowel bar finish katakana itself. Several of the new shapes barely changed from the kanji they were cut out of — ハ is the whole of 八, ミ is 三 tilted — and that, rather than their simplicity, is what makes them easy to get wrong.

≈32 minutes · stroke data from KanjiVG · every word checked against Jisho.org · the error data is a writing test on 430 Japanese schoolchildren

Twenty-five plus twenty-one is forty-six, and forty-six is the whole of katakana — the same arithmetic that finished the hiragana in lesson 2. Every sound below is one you have been saying since the first week. What is new is only which marks carry it.

1.What is left of the grid

Four consonant rows, one row of two, and one character that belongs to no row at all. The holes are in exactly the places they were in hiragana, and for exactly the same reasons.

Two things on that table are not quite what they look like. The w row's last cell, ヲ, is a character modern Japanese does not write at all — section 6 is about why it is still on the chart. And ヘ in the h row is not a printing accident: it really is the same shape as its hiragana.

2.The kanji still showing through

Lesson 8 set out the operation that made these shapes: hiragana is a whole kanji written in flowing cursive, katakana is one piece of a kanji kept straight. In this half of the chart that piece is often almost the entire character.

Fourteen are siblings. Five are strangers. Two are arguments.

Same question as day 8, asked of the remaining pairs: did the katakana and its hiragana come from the same kanji? Where they did, the family likeness is inherited and can be leaned on. Where they did not, any resemblance is an accident of two independent simplifications.

The two arguments are マ and ン, and they are unsettled in different ways. For マ the sources split between 末 and 万; since ま is certainly 末, whether that pair are siblings is itself the dispute — the same position ニ was in on day 8. ン is unsettled far more deeply: proposals include 尓, 无 and 二, and the strongest may not be a kanji at all but the old annotation mark for a nasal beat.³ Its hiragana is not in doubt — ん is 无 written cursively.

3.Write them, hear them, use them

Tap any character below. It draws itself in the correct stroke order — numbered, one stroke at a time — says itself aloud, names the hiragana that shares its sound and the kanji it was cut from, and gives three real words that use it, each glossed in English and in Arabic.

4.The ones that actually get written wrong

Which katakana cause trouble is a question with a measured answer rather than an opinion. A 2019 study tested all 45 katakana in handwriting on 430 Japanese children in school years 1–3 and sorted every error into five kinds.¹ The findings do not match the usual beginners' list, and the mismatch is the useful part.

One pair worth demoting, on the same evidence that demoted ク/タ on day 8: ワ against ク is in every beginner's list and appears nowhere in this study's error data. What Japanese children actually write instead of ワ is ウ. Both are worth a glance; only one is attested.

5.Read them cold

A character appears, you name its sound — four options, by tapping or by pressing 1–4. There is deliberately no play button on the question, because hearing it is the answer. Miss one and it stops, names the hiragana that shares the sound, shows how the strokes go, and lists the words from the cards above that contain it.

The wrong answers come from the table in section 4 before anywhere else — ル against レ, リ against ソ, マ against ユ, ヨ against ヲ. Only then does it fall back to the same row, and only then to anywhere. Wrong answers that are obviously wrong measure nothing.

6.ヲ, the character that retired

ヲ is on the chart, has a stroke order, and partners を — which means, as lesson 2 established, that it is pronounced simply o. It is also a character you can read a great deal of modern Japanese without ever meeting. Three independent signs of that:

1. The object particle is always written を, in hiragana, even in a sentence otherwise thick with katakana. That was を's only job — so it took the whole job with it.
2. Foreign words with a wo sound are now spelled ウォ, not ヲ.⁴
3. The dictionary has no entry for a single word containing it, and the writing study in section 4 tested 45 characters, not 46 — it left ヲ out on the grounds that children are not taught to write it.¹

So learn it to read — it turns up in documents written before the 1946 reforms, when ordinary Japanese was set in kanji and katakana rather than kanji and hiragana — and do not go looking for a use for it. This is the same kind of honest gap as day 5's ぱ row and day 7's ぴ row: the absence is the fact, not a hole in the chart.

7.ー, the mark that holds a vowel

Day 8 ended by naming the one thing its words needed and its chart did not contain. Here it is. ー — the chōonpu — is not a letter and not a dash. It repeats whatever vowel came before it for one more beat.

This is why so many of the words on the cards above carry it: ヒーター, メール, ラーメン, ヨーロッパ. Leave it out and the word is not merely mispronounced, it is misspelled.

One practical note: in vertically-set Japanese the mark turns with the text and is written as a vertical stroke, not a horizontal one. It is the only character on the chart that changes direction with the writing.

8.The marks, in the other script

Twenty-five more characters, and not one new shape among them. Lesson 5's rule carries over whole: two small strokes voice a row, one small circle turns h into p. Everything you learned about が ざ だ ば ぱ is true of ガ ザ ダ バ パ, which is why this section is short.

One character exists in katakana that hiragana has no version of at all: ヴ, which is ウ wearing the tenten and gives a v sound for foreign words. It is not on the chart above because it is not one of the standard forty-six-plus-twenty-five, and in practice you will meet the same word spelled both ways — ヴァイオリン and バイオリン are both current, and the dictionary tags both common. Read it; you do not need to write it.

Tell the marked from the unmarked

A second drill, over the four base rows and their marked forms together — カ サ タ ハ against ガ ザ ダ バ パ. This is the only thing in the section that is genuinely new to practise: the shapes are known and the rule is known, so what is left is noticing a diacritic the eye is trained to skip.

9.The small ャ ュ ョ, and the holes they fill

Same rule as lesson 7, and the same arithmetic. Eleven characters end in -i and can be palatalised — キ シ チ ニ ヒ ミ リ plus ギ ジ ビ ピ — times three small vowels, is 33. The small kana replaces the i, it does not follow it: キ + ャ is kya, one beat, not ki-ya.

10.The small ッ — a beat of silence

The last small character, and the only one still outstanding in both scripts. ッ is a small ツ and makes no tsu sound at all. It doubles the consonant that follows it — and it takes a full beat while doing nothing audible.

That makes three things in katakana that take a beat without being a syllable: ン, the long-vowel ー from section 7, and now ッ. Japanese counts beats, not letters — this is the same point lesson 2 made about ん, arriving for the third time.

Two rules worth having: ッ never begins a word, and it never sits before a vowel — there has to be a consonant for it to double. It is everywhere in the vocabulary already on this page:

11.The sounds katakana had to invent

Hiragana has five small vowels too, and essentially never uses them. Katakana uses them constantly, because katakana has a job hiragana does not: spelling foreign words that contain sounds Japanese does not have. There is no fa, no ti, no je in native Japanese — so katakana builds them.

The method is the one you already know from the yōon. Take the character whose consonant is right, and swap its vowel with a small one:

This closes the loop on section 6. The reason ヲ retired is sitting in the last row of that table: ウォ does the job, is built from characters you know, and follows a rule that generalises — where ヲ was a single character with a single use.

12.Katakana, finished

Every katakana word on this page is now fully readable, with nothing taken on trust:

What genuinely remains is outside the chart: a handful of archaic characters (ヰ ヱ in katakana form, and ヷ ヸ ヹ ヺ, which you will not meet), and kanji — which is a different kind of learning altogether and belongs to a different day.

Both halves of the script, the marks and the small kana are on the katakana stroke chart; the 33 combinations have their own sheet at yōon — the small ゃ ゅ ょ, which now shows both scripts.

The katakana stroke chart now covers all forty-six and is built to print — keep it beside the paper while you practise. Its companion is the hiragana stroke chart.