what is katakana actually used for?

9 comments

1. The reason you might struggle to understand some katakana words in because they aren’t all English: many fashion words are from French (like ズボン), and many medical words are from German (ワクチン, カルテ). And then there are general words from Portuguese, like イギリス and パン, キリスト.

   Katakana still has its main use marking out loan words from other languages, but it gets used just as much in onomatopoeia, too.

   Anytime you see it used outside of that, it’s usually stylistic. It may be for emphasis in a sentence because it’s distinct from kanji and hiragana, it may be used to show accent (sometimes they use katakana to represent foreigners speaking Japanese), or just because they think it looks cool. You could use it anywhere if you wanted.

2. Loan words, plant/animal names, to highlight an important word, to indicate unnatural speech (like a robot talking or whatever) are common uses. Really though it can just be whenever the writer feels like using it as a stylistic choice.

3. Yeah I’ve seen cases of kanji jukugo written out in katakana for some reason. I’m not sure why

4. I’ve been taught to look at katakana the same way as italics in English. Yes, when you put a word in German into your text, you do it in italics; but you also do italics when you need to put emphasis on a perfectly English word.

5. So, katakana is used for a number of different things, depending on what the person writing it wants to use it for, so let’s break it down.

   Classical texts often made use of katakana, especially when they were written by men, as katakana’s sharpness lended it a more masculine appearance, compared to the curvy, feminine hiragana that was often written in personal correspondence. Note that this doesn’t exclude women writing with katakana, nor does it exclude men from using hiragana necessarily.

   In games, especially older ones, katakana was used for in-game text simply because it was the easiest of the Japanese scripts to implement on older consoles, especially 8-bit ones. By the time games like *Final Fantasy V* and *Shin Megami Tensei* started making use of kanji in their text, it didn’t matter as much, but katakana was useful at the time to convey text in a legible way on consoles that couldn’t display much more than that without some trickery. In modern games, it might be used simply to harken back to the old days as part of a stylistic choice.

   As for the point on loan words, it is true that katakana is, in most cases, used for loan words. However, I think the confusion here comes from the expectation of those loan words being in English, as Japanese takes a lot of words from different languages, like Portuguese, Dutch, German, French and so on. The word for ‘bread’ or 「パン」 is Portuguese in origin, for example, and 「アルバイト」— ‘part-time work’ is derived from the German word for ‘labour’ or ‘work’.

   Katakana is also used for other purposes, such as in the taxonomical names of animals. Whilst the names can be written with kanji, usually they are written in katakana for the purpose of simplicity, and enabling it to stand out in text. For example, it’s easier to write 「カモノハシ」 instead of 「鴨嘴」when referring to a platypus, and when written out in a complex sentence, the former will stick out more due to how comparatively uncommonly katakana is used.

   As for why things like 「ワタシ」, 「アナタ」 and 「キミ」 appear, it’s usually for the same reason as the above taxonomical example: it stands out. Although I cannot provide a sufficiently good example sentence (I’m not at that level), the use of katakana in this way isn’t terribly unusual. You see it sometimes in games or novels as a way to show characters talking in a particular way or style.

   And that leads into my last point on this: its use can depend on your stylistic intent. For example, in the Monogatari Series anime, snippets of text will appear to fill in the void between cuts in scenes, written in kanji and katakana, to give it a classical style.

   TL;DR: Katakana is an uncommon but no less versatile script that is most often used for loan words from several other languages into Japanese, but was also used for technical reasons in older video games, or stylistic reasons in more recent ones. Its less common use compared to hiragana and kanji enables it to stand out in text, hence its use in contexts like taxonomy and providing characters with nuance in how they talk within a written medium.

6. loan words, sound effects, foreign sounding words, EMPHASIS LIKE IN CAPS, animal names, anything you want

7. Lowering my grades…

8. I would advice just not thinking about this tbh. I don’t think you’re ever going to be completely confused just because you didn’t 100% get the nuance of something being in katakana, and there aren’t any hard and fast rules to memorize that cover all uses. You’ll get a feel for it overtime. Aside from the couple of real conventions like species names, writers just use katakana when they feel like using katakana.

9. it’s also used as a stylistic effect, like in english where you would write a few words in all caps or in a bold/italic font

   in some specific cases, i would say it’s almost a kind of convention?

   like animal names written in katakana even when the name is a regular japanese word

   or shônen manga protagonists names, for example: they are traditionally written in katakana, it makes them stand out, and easier to read especially for younger kids. According to wikipedia, before the Taishô era it was actually the standard way to write first names

   >i also see commonly in games, they replace words like 君 私 and あなた with キミ,ワタシ,アナタ. why?

   probably the same kind of logic? or a standard inherited from the older games where kanjis were hard to have on the cartridge and then hard to read on the pixelated CRT display? anyway it’s a quirky thing but not “wrong” at all