Let's Learn Katakana: Second Book of Basic Japanese Writing

by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura

There are three types of Japanese script-katakana, hiragana, and kanji. It is possible to read Japanese knowing only a limited number of kanji, but it is not possible with only a limited number of katakana or hiragana-one must know all of them. Let's Learn Katakana , and its companion volume
Let's Learn Hiragana , is a textbook that introduces the learner to the basics of one of these fundamental Japanese scripts. Being a workbook, it contains all the exercises that allow the student to master katakana by the time the book has been finished. Let's Learn Katakana is a classic in the
field, and the huge number of students that have used it successfully is a sign of its preeminence as a self-study guide.

Genres: Nonfiction, Japan, Reference, Japanese Literature, Language

88 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1985

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book was great. It was a textbook for a Japanese course I took many years ago and I learned Katakana - at the time. Don't remember much now but I use it when I run across some words in Katakana I have this one and the Hiragana one. I would recommend them. It sped up the learning curve a bit for me.

Note from Oct 2015: Tucked in this book is a piece of paper with my practice writing on it. It then has a section in English with my Saturday to do list. Iron, recycle newspapers, study Japanese, and buy a spading fork. This is followed by another line that says "Wish I could just sleep in". I haven't changed.

[Jenna (Falling Letters) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learnt hiragana in a Japanese course and then used this book to teach myself katakana. Fantastic resource, lots of examples and exercises, shows you the many contexts for using katakana.

[Reiko Pal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks...I love this book so I have rated it 5 stars...thanks

[Freya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most folks learn hiragana and katakana simply by rote memorisation, which works well enough, but oh boy how much more fun it is to learn kana whilst learning vocabulary! 2 birds, 1 stone. As an added bonus for this book specifically, katakana words are often derived from English, so super easy to remember; consider it 'free vocabulary'. Some words are less evident of course, and as I took up the habit of looking these up, I noticed there are too many mistakes in this book. Often translations that don't fit the words in the best way (of in ANY way), and sometimes words that are obsolete. This stands in stark contrast with some other Kodansha published books that I own and love, for they are nearly without fault. The phased approach is preferred, but not necessary, so you could go ahead and look up katakana word lists yourself.

[Punk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second book is much like Let's Learn Hiragana: First Book of Basic Japanese Writing in terms of structure and content. It introduces the katakana in larger batches, though, and gives fewer exercises for each batch, meaning I didn't have as much time to grow familiar with them before it was on to the next batch. I switched to another book (A Guide to Learning Hiragana & Katakana) for some additional practice before I added any more katakana into my system.

This introduces usage rules unique to katakana, then tosses you into the weird yōon and lets you sink. One problem asks you to write "du" but "du" does not appear on its weird yōon chart. Here's another instance where having the answers to these exercises would have been beneficial because, honestly, WTF. Was that a typo or did it expect me to substitute "dyu"? I'm trying to learn Japanese, not make it up.

Once you've learned all the katakana there is to kata, there's a thorough guide to transcribing English words ("As you will see, the system is logical and functional, even though consistency does not reach 100 percent." LOL) followed by a set of truly intimidating exercises: A huge section where, using these rules, you write or identify English words in Japanese, which I skipped, and then twenty sentences in romaji that require a basic understanding of Japanese grammar—which these books do not teach—in order to decide which parts to write in hiragana and which to write in katakana. I did okay on those even though my Japanese grammar is as basic as it gets, but this was probably due to most of the katakana words being the obvious English kind. There are answers in the back for all these exercises.

This book is from 1985 and hasn't been updated, so it defines "karaoke" for you and has you writing words like "mini computer" and "telex," so it's possible you might end up sounding kind of new wave in your katakana use, but it teaches the basics—along with pages and pages of onomatopoeia—and I learned to write and use katakana in just a few days, in between the muttered complaints.

[Luru · Rating 4 out of 5]

I skipped most of the exercises in the end of this book because I used it to practise my Katakana character knowledge.

This book first teaches you the basic Katakana syllabary, helps you to memorize them, gives you a bunch of exercises, and then moves on to explain how Katakana is used.

There seem to be many opinions on how certain chracters are used and how some words should look like, and this book gives you a glimpse of a fact that not everything is totally set in stone with Kanakana and its usage.

There are a lot of exercises in the end, aiming to teach you how to "translate" English words into Japanese through Katakana. I skipped those exercises, but all in all it looked like a quick, good look at some basic tricks with the characters.