<< Part V — Part VII >>

Today, we’re really going to do some intensive learning. It’s the only way we’ll get through all 46 of the characters you need.

It doesn’t stop there, either… there will still be a few tricks to learn once you have the basic characters. However, after that, you’ll be reading katakana like a native!

Firstly, some revision. By now you should know:

オ - o
カ - ka, ケ - ke
ガ - ga, ゲ - ge
テ - te, ト - to
デ - de, ド - do
ヒ - hi
ビ - bi
メ - me
ラ - ra, ル - ru, レ - re, ロ - ro
ン - n
ー - vowel lengthener

You should be able to read, moderately quickly:

ロンドン、　ビデオ、　ラーメン、　テレビ、　カメラ、　カラオケ。

If you’ve got that alright, then let’s move on to some more characters. We’ll fill up our plain vowels first:

ア - a

Start at the top left and draw across and diagonally down as one stroke. Then as a second stroke, draw the slightly curved vertical.

イ - i

Start at the top-right of the diagonal, and draw down to the left. Then add the vertical starting at the top.

ウ - u

Draw the short top line, then the short left line. Then in one stroke, the horizontal from left to right, continuing down the curve.

エ - e

This one is straight-forward: top then middle then bottom.

Now the vowels are full, we’ll also complete our ‘r’ row:

リ - ri

Left line first, then the longer, curved right line. Both drawn from top to bottom.

Real-life usage

So, let’s start using our characters.

クラウン - crown
エメール - email
アメリカ - America
インド - India

And since we’re on the subject of countries, here are some for you to work on yourselves (in some sort of order of difficulty)…

イラン
アラビア
トンガ
エリトリア
アイルランド
ラトビア

If you’re having trouble with the last one, don’t forget that ‘r’ characters can be used to represent ‘l’, and as seen in ビデオ, the ‘b’ characters can be used to represent ‘v’. Got it now? Good work!

Join us next time when Superman will put in a very useful appearance.