Katakana Quiz (カタカナ)

Katakana covers exactly the same 46 sounds as hiragana, so on paper it is no bigger a job. In practice most learners find it harder, for two reasons. The shapes are angular and share strokes with each other, so several pairs look nearly identical. And you see katakana far less often: hiragana carries all the grammar, so it repeats in every sentence, while katakana turns up only when a loanword does.

Less exposure means less accidental practice, which is exactly why drilling it deliberately pays off more than drilling hiragana does.

シ and ツ 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 and ン follow the same logic at a smaller scale.

ク has a sharp corner where ワ has a wide open one. ノ, メ and ヌ are the same stroke with one more added each time. If you miss one of these, run the quiz again immediately rather than moving on. These four sets account for most katakana misreadings, and they are the reason people who "know katakana" still stumble on a menu.

The trap with katakana is guessing from English rather than reading. ストライキ is su-to-ra-i-ki, five beats. Read it as strike and you will never spell it correctly, and you will mishear it when someone says it. The quiz asks for the romaji precisely to force reading over guessing.

Watch the long vowel bar too. コーヒー is koohii, not kohi. Vowel length is a real distinction in Japanese, not emphasis, and dropping it changes the word.

This quiz covers the basic kana, the dakuten and the combinations. The katakana chart also lists the foreign sound rows that katakana invented to spell borrowed words: ファ fa, ティ ti, ヴ vu, ジェ je and the rest. They do not exist in hiragana at all.

Those are worth reading once and recognising rather than drilling. They follow a rule, a base kana plus a small vowel, so once you have seen the pattern you can decode any of them on sight.