katakana chinese characters

Read the tables from top to bottom, and from left to right. Each have different usage, purpose and characteristics and all are necessary in Japanese writing.

It is the eighteenth syllable in the gojūon order; its position is タ行ウ段 (ta-gyō u-dan, “row ta, section u”). It is easier to read than the kanji (the picture method based on Chinese characters). Most Japanese sentences you see will have combinations of hiragana and kanji, and on occasion katakana.

Both hiragana and katakana are simplified forms of kanji (Chinese characters). Once the 46 katakana symbols have been learned, the reader knows how to pronounce them. The Japanese writing system consists of two types of characters: the syllabic kana – hiragana (平仮名) and katakana (片仮名) – and kanji (漢字), the adopted Chinese characters.

Japan had no writing system before Chinese characters were introduced in the first or second century AD. The katakana syllable ツ (tsu). Katakana, on the other hand, is more like the print fonts in its appearance: more block-ish and sharp. Hiragana is curly like English cursive. Katakana is a Japanese script used for writing words borrowed from other languages. Initially the Japanese tried to write Chinese, but since Chinese and Japanese are unrelated languages, they also used kanji to represent Japanese sounds. Japanese is unique in its use of both vertical and horizontal writing formats and in the fact that it is a language in which ideographic characters (kanji or Chinese characters) and phonetic symbols (the hiragana and katakana syllabaries) co-exist. Chinese characters are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese.

Its equivalent in hiragana is つ (tsu).

Japanese Katakana Chart.

You can memorize the proper order for the basic kana characters with the saying: 1) “Kana Signs, Take Note How Much You Read and Write them.” This usage is similar to that of the Japanese Katakana, although the Katakanas use a special set of simplified forms of Chinese characters, in order to advertize their value as purely phonetic symbols. This is because katakana is based on the regular script (kaisho) form of Chinese characters, while the cursive script (sōsho) form of the kanji was the origin of hiragana.