Complete Katakana Chart with Romaji

Katakana is hiragana's angular twin: the same 46 sounds, different shapes, used for loanwords, foreign names, onomatopoeia, and emphasis. If you know hiragana, you already know how every katakana is pronounced and typed — this chart gives you the shapes, plus the extra combinations katakana uses for foreign sounds that Japanese didn't originally have.

The 46 basic katakana

The romaji under each character is also its keyboard input. Watch out for the four infamous look-alikes: シ (shi) vs ツ (tsu), and ン (n) vs ソ(so) — the strokes' angle and direction are the difference.

Dakuten and handakuten

Exactly as in hiragana, the ゛ mark voices a consonant (k→g, s→z, t→d, h→b) and ゜ makes the p-row:

Combination sounds

An i-column character plus small ャ ュ ョ blends into one syllable — シャワー (shower), ジュース (juice), チョコ (chocolate):

Extended katakana for foreign sounds

Because katakana's whole job is writing foreign words, it grew extra combinations that hiragana rarely uses — a full-size character plus a small vowel:

These give you ファン (fan), パーティー (party), ウェブ(web). You'll meet them constantly in menus, tech, and brand names.

The long vowel bar ー

Katakana marks long vowels with a simple bar: コーヒー (coffee), ケーキ (cake). On a keyboard it's just the hyphen key — ko-hi- produces コーヒー. Details and more typing specifics in how to type katakana.

When Japanese actually uses katakana

Knowing when a word will appear in katakana makes reading dramatically easier. The four main jobs: loanwords (テレビ, パン, アルバイト — that last one from German), foreign names and places (アメリカ, マイケル — including yours, which is why typing your own name is the classic first katakana exercise), onomatopoeia (ドキドキ heartbeat, ワクワク excitement — anime subtitles are full of these), and emphasis, the way English uses italics. Menus, storefronts, and product packaging in Japan are dense with katakana, which makes it arguably the most immediately useful script for a visitor — you can decode half a menu on katakana alone.

Learning katakana fast

Katakana's killer feature for learners: the vocabulary is free. アニメ, ホテル, バス, アイス— you already know these words; you're only learning to see them. That makes typing drills almost unfairly effective here: each loanword you type is pure character practice with zero vocabulary load. A week of daily drills covers the whole chart.