The Japanese writing system contains three different sets of characters.

In a Japanese texts you usually find a mixture of these systems.

Kanji is the main system. It is an adoption of the Chinese characters. There

is over 50 000 different kanji characters, (but you can get by with a lot

less than that).

Hiragana and katakana are systems derivated from kanji where each

character represents a sound. The sounds are the vocals 'a', 'i', 'u',

'e' and 'o',the consonant 'n' and the rest of the sounds represented by a

character, are a combination of a consonant and one of the vocals, such

as 'ka', 'sa' and 'na'.

Hiragana is mostly used to write traditional Japanese words.

Katakana is, among other things, used for the transcription of foreign

language words and to write loan words. Words written with katakana can

often (but not always) be understood if you know katakana even if you don't

know much Japanese.

In a katakana text you might also see to signs that effects the sound of

the character before or after the sign.

A short horizontal line indicates that the vocal before the sign is long.

A small version of the sign for 'tsu' indicates that the following consonant

is doubled.

The purpose of the program in this application is to help memorizing what

sound different katakana characters represent. The button NEXT will show

you a randomly selected character. With the button CHECK you can check

what the correct answer is.