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Today, we learn four more characters (so hold on to your hats) and that gives us a couple of key Japanese icons.

First off, a bit more background. The writing system you’re learning is called ‘katakana’ カタカナ. It’s one of four systems used in Japan. The others are rōmaji, or ‘roman characters’ - those are the ones you’re used to seeing in English, then there are ‘hiragana’ ひらがな which are the less angular, more curvy phonetic characters they use, and then the ‘kanji’ 漢字, which are the Chinese-style characters. The beauty of the ‘katakana’ is that they’re used almost entirely for words borrowed from foreign languages - usually English, so if you see a word written in the characteristic angled characters, you can often read it straight off, only having to convert the characters and then work out what English word they represent.

So, on to the new characters for today:

カ - ka

Draw the horizontal and the rightmost curve first as one stroke. The hook is created by ticking up and to the left as you remove your pen from the paper. After that stroke, add the gently curved vertical crossing through it.

Note that adding dakuten gives you ガ - ga. As with the ‘t’ characters, and you’ll later see with ’s’ character, the dakuten give a similar, but weaker/softer sound.

ケ - ke

Draw the small, leftmost curve first, from top to bottom. Then the horizontal, then the lower vertical curve. Ensure the final vertical appears half-way across the horizontal line… there is a similar character coming later with the final stroke in a different place.

Again, this gets us ゲ - ge for free.

ラ - ra

Draw the top stroke first, then the horizontal and downward curve as a single stroke.

メ - me

This isn’t really a simple cross. First draw a downward curved stroke - you’ve already had practice doing that with ラ and ケ but make sure the line goes almost right from the top-right to the bottom-left of the imaginary square you’re drawing in. Then cross this line out from upper-left to lower-right with a shorter stroke.

Real-life usage

Now you’ve got these characters added to your arsenal, you should be able to recognise the katakana characters from the marked sign. Although this word is not borrowed from a foreign language, you will sometimes see katakana used in advertising and billboards to emphasise the text. But, even though it’s a native Japanese word, you should be able to identify it because it has made its way into English…

You should also be able to tell me what the following shop sells. Here we see one of the keys to language learning - even though you can now read the marked characters, it is actually blatantly obvious what the shop sells without even having to resort to translation. But we’ll translate anyway…

Something else you’ll now be able to get hold of in Japan is noodles. For some reason, they’re nearly always written in the katakana character set, and they’re called rāmen. Or as you’ll see here, ラーメン.

So, we seem to have strayed off the subject of t-shirts, but I’ll do my best to find some examples and gear some future characters towards reading them! For now, though, try to get these new characters in your brain. You’ll definitely be needing them later.