Interactive Katakana Chart

This chart shows all 46 katakana characters in the traditional aiueo order. Click any cell to hear its pronunciation through your device's Japanese voice. Toggle romaji off once you want to test yourself - try to recall the reading from the shape alone before clicking.

What katakana is for

Katakana is the angular Japanese script used primarily for words borrowed from other languages. When a foreign word enters Japanese, it gets transcribed into katakana sounds. Coffee becomes コーヒー (koohii). Computer becomes コンピューター (konpyuutaa). Television becomes テレビ (terebi). These loanwords, called gairaigo, make up a large chunk of everyday Japanese vocabulary.

Katakana has other uses too. Brand names and product names often appear in katakana. Scientific terms, especially for plants and animals, use katakana by convention. Manga and anime use katakana for robotic speech, foreign characters, or words said with unusual emphasis. Onomatopoeia - the sound words that Japanese uses constantly - often appear in katakana as well.

Learning katakana after hiragana

The single most important thing to know: katakana represents the exact same sounds as hiragana. Every syllable you can say in hiragana, you can say in katakana. The sounds do not change. Only the shapes change. This means if you already know hiragana, you are not learning a new phonetic system - you are learning 46 new shapes that map to sounds you already know. Most adults get through katakana in two to four focused sessions.

The recommended approach is to learn katakana the same way you did hiragana: row by row, with active recall. Learn a row, cover the romaji, try to recall each character. Then add the next row and drill both together. By the time you reach the end, the early rows are already reinforced.

Katakana characters that look alike

Katakana has its own set of visually similar characters that trip up learners. These are the pairs worth watching:

• ソ (so) vs. ン (n) - perhaps the most famous. ソ has strokes that angle downward-right then curve; ン angles upward-right. Pay attention to the direction of the final stroke.
• シ (shi) vs. ツ (tsu) - the katakana version of the hiragana shi/tsu confusion. シ has two short strokes on the left going left-to-right; ツ has two short strokes going top-to-bottom.
• ア (a) vs. マ (ma) - both have a similar top-left corner. The difference is the bottom portion.
• ク (ku) vs. タ (ta) - similar structure, different detail in the upper strokes.
• テ (te) vs. チ (chi) - テ has a clean horizontal top with a drop; チ has a curved lower portion.

Reading loanwords in practice

One of the rewards of learning katakana is that you can start reading foreign loanwords immediately. Walk into any convenience store in Japan or open a Japanese website and you will see dozens of katakana words you can decode. アイスクリーム (aisukuriimu, ice cream), レストラン (resutoran, restaurant), ホテル (hoteru, hotel), バス (basu, bus). The pronunciation usually follows English closely enough to be recognizable, though vowel lengths and consonant clusters are adjusted to fit Japanese phonology.

Japanese sometimes adds vowels to break up consonant clusters that do not exist in Japanese. "Strike" becomes ストライク (sutoraiku). "Bed" becomes ベッド (beddo). Learning to anticipate these adjustments makes loanword recognition much faster.

Long vowels in katakana

Katakana uses a special character for long vowels: the horizontal dash ー. This character means "hold the previous vowel longer." コーヒー (koohii) has two of them. ケーキ (keeki, cake) has one. This is different from hiragana, where long vowels are written by adding a second vowel character. The ー mark makes katakana text a bit easier to read once you know it.

Where to go from here

Once you can read katakana alongside hiragana, you have the full phonetic foundation for Japanese. The next layer is vocabulary - specifically the JLPT N5 word list, which covers the 800 most essential words for beginners. You can also look at the complete katakana learning guide for a structured schedule, or take the kana quiz to test both scripts together.

If you want a mobile app that handles hiragana, katakana, and vocabulary in one place, Inku is available on iPhone with a 7-day free trial. Download Inku.