Hi, I’m learning Japanese in part by copying texts. I’m having trouble finding articles or books that are predominately in Katakana. Does anyone know where I should look? I don’t mind if it’s a mix of hiragana, kanji and katakana, as long as it has a lot of katakana. I also don’t really care about the complexity because the point is to practice and memorize the script.
Thanks in advance!
8 comments
I’m a bit confused by what you mean. Katakana is used mainly to write plant and animal names and to transcribe foreign words.
I don’t think you’d find a book written predominately in katakana unless you look for stuff written during Imperial Japan, where katakana was used instead of hiragana in official texts, or games on 8-bit systems, where katakana is used for technical limitations
I don’t think that’s quite how it works.
There are good katakana decks to download for Anki though.
Well I’m not sure what you want exactly. It sounds like you just want real examples of katakana mixed in with text so you can learn to identify it and read it better. Take some time to write katakana down as well as part of your practice routine. Doesn’t take more than 30 minutes to complete the syllabary.
This is Vtuber content so just pause it and look at the comments. You can do this with any Japanese video, just open it, pause it and look at the comments. Videos where the content has a lot of loan words or slang will have a ton of katakana in the comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k5VpiTMCzo
Wikipedia articles about random species of plants.
a starbucks menu will have a TON of katakana
fantasy books and computer games have a lot of katakana
basically nothing is complete katakana.
Ingredient lists for products maybe
i don’t know why there are negitive comments, because it seems like a good idea. try some ancient japanese text. probably don’t go edo-period because those might have alot of archaic characters. for meiji period, there are very few in use.
here are some links:
https://d3mn0rm7t2z33v.cloudfront.net/images/wi-textbook.png
(contains ヰ which is an archaic character, but the rest should be modern characters)
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/863888/1/11 (i haven’t thourily checked it for archaic characters)
Katakana is not a heavily used writing system in the Japanese language compared to hiragana and kanji. It’s only used for foreign words adopted by Japanese or for emphasis similar in the way quotation marks are used. But, if you’re hungry for more Katakana content, the natural version of the Crystal Hunters manga uses it more often. Also, the culture website http://www.watanoc.com uses katakana more in its N4-N1 content.
If you want to go a little crazy, one of my friends ran English sentences through an English to Katakana converter like this one:
https://www.sljfaq.org/cgi/e2k.cgi
He read like 100+ short texts through it until he was satisfied with his knowledge of the katakana characters and jumped right back into Japanese. Not that he stopped, but katakana tends to be more infrequent in Japanese texts, or considered more advanced reading, so this got him the abundance of katakana he was looking for. Worked for him.