Katakana
All 46 base katakana plus dakuten, handakuten and yōon. Tap any character for stroke-by-stroke animation, writing order and pronunciation.
Katakana (カタカナ) is Japan's second syllabary, also made of 46 characters. Like hiragana, they come from kanji — but as angular fragments instead of cursive strokes. Katakana represents the exact same sounds as hiragana. Same phonetics, different look, different usage.
Same sounds, different usage. Hiragana is round and flowing, used for native Japanese. Katakana is angular and serves mostly for foreign loanwords (コーヒー = kōhī = coffee), foreign names, onomatopoeia, and emphasis — a bit like italics in English.
Katakana shows up everywhere on restaurant menus (パスタ, ハンバーガー), shop signs, electronics, brand names, manga character names. If you can read katakana, you can decode a huge chunk of visual Japan — even without knowing a word of Japanese.
Many learners find katakana harder because they appear less often in running text. The method that works: flashcards on the 46 base katakana, then the quiz to pressure-test recognition, then tracing to lock the shape into memory. Classic traps to watch: シ/ツ and ソ/ン look dangerously similar.