Katakana | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-12-17

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Katakana


00:01:37 1 Writing system
00:01:46 1.1 Script
00:05:02 1.2 Japanese
00:05:10 1.2.1 Syllabary and orthography
00:08:13 1.2.2 Usage
00:13:57 1.3 Ainu
00:14:46 1.4 Taiwanese
00:15:40 1.5 Okinawan
00:16:10 2 Table of ikatakana/i
00:16:57 3 History
00:18:03 4 Stroke order
00:18:26 5 Computer encoding
00:18:49 5.1 Half-width kana
00:21:05 5.2 Unicode
00:24:40 6 See also



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SUMMARY
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Katakana (片仮名, かたかな, カタカナ, Japanese pronunciation: [katakana]) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character, or kana, in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as "a" (katakana ア); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (katakana カ); or "n" (katakana ン), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n, or ng ([ŋ]), or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese.
In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is quite similar to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals, and often Japanese companies.
Katakana are characterized by short, straight strokes and sharp corners. There are two main systems of ordering katakana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering, and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.