In this booster
This is the course’s one skill booster — it teaches no words at all. Katakana is the alphabet Japan uses for foreign words, and foreign words are mostly English: a menu that says ビール・コーヒー・アイスクリーム is a menu that says beer, coffee, ice cream in a costume. Learn the costume and whole shelves of Japan switch back into a language you already read.
Two facts make this far cheaper than it looks. First, you already own every sound — Lesson 0 trained the entire sound inventory, so nothing here is new to your ears or mouth; each character just assigns a shape to a sound you have. Second, most of the drill words below are words you already know by ear — koohii, biiru, takushii, kaado — so the script is the only new thing on the page.
One big inversion, this module only: everywhere else the course says play first, then read. Here your eyes go first: look at the character, say it out loud, then tap — the audio plays and the romaji appears to check you. Same drill in the Anki deck: katakana on the front, sound and romaji on the back.
Budget an evening to meet all the characters, and the rest of the trip to make them stick — every sign you pass is a free flashcard. (Two rare characters, ヂ and ヅ, and the archaic ヲ are omitted; you can go years in Japan without meeting them.)
The five vowels — and the long bar
Lesson 0’s five pure vowels, now with faces. And one non-character first, because you’ll see it inside half the words below: the long bar ー just stretches the vowel before it — it’s Lesson 0’s held vowel, made visible. コ is ko; コー is koo.
Every character from here on is one of these five vowels riding a consonant, in the same order — a, i, u, e, o — row after row. Learn the pattern once and each new row is one consonant, not five characters.
K, S, T, N
Twenty characters, four consonants. Three irregulars to respect — the S row’s シ shi, the T row’s チ chi and ツ tsu — they’re irregular in exactly the way Lesson 0 taught your mouth, so trust your ears over the grid.
k —
s —
t —
n —
Twenty-five characters in, and you can already read. Say each of these out loud before tapping:
Takushii has been yours since Lesson 6 — now it’s yours in writing too. The others are marked read, don’t memorize: they exist to exercise the characters (though katsu curry and steak have a way of becoming vocabulary at dinnertime anyway).
H, M, Y, R, W — and the lone n
Twenty-one more and the basic alphabet is done. One irregular: the H row’s フ fu (Lesson 0’s soft, blown fu — not an English F). And the standalone ン n — the humming beat from Lesson 0, the only character with no vowel.
h —
m —
y — (three only; the gaps died out centuries ago)
r — (Lesson 0’s Japanese r: soft tap, halfway to an L)
w, and the lone n —
The full basic alphabet is yours. Now it pays off — every one of these first six is a word you’ve owned for lessons:
Two dots and a small circle
Not new characters — one rule. Two small dots (゛) voice a consonant: k→g, s→z, t→d, h→b. A small circle (゜) turns h→p. Same shapes you just learned, new engine sounds: カ ka → ガ ga; ヒ hi → ビ bi → ピ pi.
g (k + ゛) —
z (s + ゛; ジ is ji) —
d (t + ゛; only three survive in practice) —
b (h + ゛) —
p (h + ゜) —
The dots unlock the words you use most:
The small characters
Three spelling habits, no new sounds — all three are Lesson 0 rhythm made visible:
- Small ッ is the held silent beat (the middle of kippu). ロッカー = ro…kkaa — you drilled that catch in Lesson 0.
- Small ャ・ュ・ョ glue onto an i-column character and fuse into one beat: シ + small ャ = シャ sha; ニ + small ュ = ニュ nyu.
- Small vowels (ァィゥェォ) build sounds Japanese didn’t have, for foreign words only: フ + small ァ = ファ fa. Katakana invents freely here — sound it out and trust your ear.
Say these before tapping — every rule above appears at least once:
The look-alikes
Four sets of near-twins cause almost every misreading. Don’t drill these harder — just learn the tells once and check back when a word refuses to make sense.
| The twins | The tell |
|---|---|
| シ shi / ツ tsu | シ’s small strokes lie flat and its long stroke sweeps up from below; ツ’s strokes stand tall and the long one sweeps down from above. |
| ソ so / ン n | Same tell, one stroke each: ソ sweeps down (tall first stroke), ン sweeps up (flat first stroke). |
| ク ku / ワ wa / フ fu | ク has a beak on the left; ワ is closed across the top; フ is a bare shelf — one corner, nothing else. |
| コ ko / ユ yu | コ is an open box; ユ has a floor sticking out past the wall. |
When a menu word comes out as nonsense, odds are one of these eight characters is the culprit — re-check them first.
The menu test
The graduation exam is any café menu in Japan. Here’s one. Cover the sounds, read each line aloud, then tap to check. All are read, don’t memorize — the point is decoding, though you may find you already know every one of them from home:
If you read all seven — slowly counts — you have the skill. Speed is just mileage now.
How to practice
- The konbini is your flashcard deck. Drink bottles, snack shelves, and ice-cream freezers are 90% katakana, and the picture on the package confirms your answer instantly. Five minutes of shelf-reading a day beats any app.
- Menus over signs. Restaurant menus reward you constantly (most items are loanwords); street signs are mostly kanji and will only discourage you. Read where katakana lives.
- Slow is correct. Sounding a word out character by character is reading — natives watching you decode ハンバーガー are watching a person read, not a person struggle.
- Don’t chase the last 10%. A handful of rare characters and combinations will stump you occasionally; the camera app (see Beyond) remains the right tool for those. This module’s job is the daily 90%.
Anki deck
This deck runs backwards from every other deck in the course: the katakana is on the front — read it aloud, then flip for the audio and romaji. Character cards and word cards together: download the Katakana Anki deck. Drill all of it; unlike the lesson decks, there’s nothing here to suspend — the characters are the course.