Katakana Chart
Katakana (カタカナ), the other of the two Japanese syllabaries, are characterized by short straight and angular corners and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts. The main uses of katakana in modern Japanese are onomatopoeia, technical/scientific terms, transcription of words from foreign languages and emphasis (roughly analogous to italics in English).
I found this hiragana chart quite useful as reference while studying that particular syllabary. Unfortunately I couldn’t find an equivalent katakana chart so I created a new one using the hiragana chart as a template. Hopefully someone else might also find it useful.
The Katakana chart image is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
March 8th, 2006 at 6:50 am
Hey great kana chart…
i reall liek the way it is arranged into the vowel groups AND has stroke order.
I’m just a beginner so this will very useful thanks!!
March 11th, 2006 at 2:31 am
Thanks for the feedback Rich. If I may be so bold as to give you a tip, flash cards work quite well with kana. Also, when you doodle at whatever occasion try writing out the whole hiragana or katakana syllibary. This helped me memorize how to read and write out the kana characters quite a bit.
February 21st, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Great chart. You really captured the original design.
I’m studying it now.
February 21st, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Thank you Brian and がんばって! (good luck)
February 21st, 2007 at 10:13 pm
thanks
im going to get this laminated and buy some graph paper for some heavy repetition.
I’ll stop crowding your blog now
February 21st, 2007 at 10:45 pm
No, you are welcome! With Japanese I have found that the mind learns to recognize first and then to imitate what it recognizes. This means you’ll find that you will learn to recognize the kana before you can write them. This is cool since it would be strange if you could imitate things you are not able to recognize.
Anyway, as I suggested to Rich above, try creating your own flash cards and doodle the chart as often as you can. If you use Windows, try out the free and small Dreamkana software from Dreambreed. When you eventually start with Kanji one day, you might find studying them through mnemonics (pictures and stories) fascinating and fun.
Once again, good luck and let me know how it goes.
March 4th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Hi, I came across your site searching for a kana chart. I started learning Japanese last month and this chart was very useful. So I wanted to say thanks.
ありがとございました
March 4th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
どういたしまして。 Thanks for dropping by and がんばって!
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:16 am
Very helpful. Thanks!
The stroke order for ウ looks ambiguous to me. Which stroke is 2 and which is 3?
Regards,
Craig
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Hi Craig, you are welcome. With ウ the vertical stokes come before the third stroke. This page might make it a little clearer. Happy learning!
February 4th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
watashe wa : Snikcers . . . . 4 4 4 4
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:52 am
I’m studying hiragana and katakana for when I travel to Japan on vacation, and I needed a chart to reference while learning. Thanks so much for this chart!
June 30th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Thank you alot for the chart ! Now I can finaly engrave my name on my bokken. I had a hard time to remember the whole chart since I was studying japanese in school
August 5th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
This helps sooo much with my homework!
is there a way of writing “VI”? or “FI”
September 5th, 2009 at 10:37 am
You are my hero! I’ve been looking for a decent katakana chart for ages, and now I find a superb one! Thank you! I’m going to use it for a booklet on beginner’s Japanese and I can’t wait now to use it.
I owe you one!
September 13th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
@inferno10, Urunurufu, Moriya Sensei: you are very welcome- thank you for using it!
@Emo-the-great: They can written as VI - ヴィ and FI - フィ.