Katakana Chart

A Japanese katakana chart looks like the hiragana one because it is the same sound system wearing different clothes. カ and か both read ka. The grid works the same way: every kana except ン is a consonant plus one of five vowels, a, i, u, e and o, so a row is a consonant family and a column is a vowel.

What changes is the job. Katakana writes words borrowed from other languages, foreign names, the names of plants and animals in scientific writing, sound effects in manga, and the occasional word set in katakana purely for emphasis, the way italics work in English.

The shapes are more angular than hiragana because they were cut down from pieces of Chinese characters rather than written cursively. That makes them faster to write and, at first, easier to confuse.

People often ask for the katakana alphabet chart, but like hiragana this is a syllabary rather than an alphabet: every entry in the katakana table is a syllable, not a letter. Read it alongside the hiragana chart, since together they are the two halves of the Japanese kana chart.

シ shi and ツ tsu differ only in where the two short strokes sit and which way the long stroke sweeps: on シ the strokes sit low and the sweep goes up, on ツ they sit high and the sweep comes down. ソ so and ン n follow the same rule.

ク ku has a sharp corner where ワ wa has a wide open one. ノ no, メ me and ヌ nu are the same stroke with one more added each time.

These four sets account for most early katakana misreadings. Drilling them in isolation is worth more than another pass over the whole chart, and the kana quiz mixes them in deliberately.

Japanese has no native f, v or ti sound, so katakana builds them out of parts it already has. フ fu plus a small vowel gives ファ fa, フィ fi, フェ fe and フォ fo, which is how ファミリー famirii spells family. テ te plus a small ィ gives ティ ti, as in パーティー paatii, party.

ヴ writes v, though plenty of established words still use the B row instead: a violin is バイオリン, not ヴァイオリン, in most writing. When you meet a loanword, say it out loud in Japanese rhythm rather than English; ストライキ is sutoraiki, five beats, and hearing it as strike will not help you spell it.

Katakana marks a long vowel with a single bar, ー, instead of adding a vowel kana the way hiragana does. コーヒー is koohii, coffee. ケーキ is keeki, cake. In horizontal writing the bar lies flat; in vertical writing it stands upright.

The bar is not decoration. Dropping it changes the word and often makes it unrecognisable, because vowel length is a real distinction in Japanese rather than a matter of emphasis.

A small ッ works exactly as it does in hiragana: it is silent, it doubles the consonant after it, and it takes up a full beat. ベッド is beddo, bed.

The printable katakana chart PDF is one page: gojuon through dakuten, handakuten, the combinations and the foreign sound rows, with every kana's reading underneath.

Download printable PDF

The fastest katakana practice is to learn this alongside hiragana rather than after it. The two scripts share one sound system, so every row you already know in hiragana is a row you half know here.