Katakana 7: Contracted Sounds + Long Vowels

Introduction

Welcome to your final katakana lesson! Good job on making it here, I know it's been a lot of work.

So, I haven’t yet taught you how Japanese adapted to the words it "borrowed" from other languages. How do we write the letter v, for example? Or f? Katakana is used for loan words, but Japanese doesn’t have those sounds... Or does it?! Buckle in, because today's lesson is all about the answer to that exact question (and more)!

Introducing the (not so) Versatile: Katakana

Katakana naturally has some pronunciation gaps to fill, since English and Japanese aren't exactly... perfect for each other (ouch). If Japanese had stuck to only the basic characters, it’d be producing sounds that are only a little similar to their English equivalent at best. As time went on, international influences and multiculturalism grew across the land, and O.G. katakana’s limitations became clear.

—That is until it got (kinda) fixed by the addition of two cool new things: the long vowel dash and small vowels. These don’t quite fill in all the gaps, but it brings us much closer.

Shall we meet them?

And yes, don’t worry, you don't have to memorize new characters. Wink.

The Long Vowel: “—”

Unlike hiragana, all long vowels in katakana have one simple shortcut: this dash ー. As much as I would love to talk for hours about this wonderful line, there's really nothing much to it aside from being a vowel extender. Whenever you see a character followed by this dash, simply stretch out the vowel of the character before it.

This is to make up for the many, many long vowels that exist in so many loan words.

Let’s take the word “coat” for example. For katakana to properly convey the elongated o sound this word has, we need to add the dash right after the ko syllable. So from “coat”, we get コート kōto:

Hear how the o sound was elongated? Quite the big difference when we remove this handy dash:

(Disclaimer: Example B is merely a comparative illustration for how the dash, ー, can affect kana, and is not necessarily a real word)

The Small Vowels ァィゥェォ

This should be familiar! Remember contracted sounds? For that one, we only used ya, yu, and yo sounds. This time, we get to use all the vowel sounds and adjust them however we need to in order to be as accurate to the original word’s pronunciation as possible.

Again, they're not exact matches but rather, “close enough” matches. If we wanted to get any closer, we'd have to learn even more kana characters. (Phew. Dodged that bullet).

So, how do we use these small vowels? Much like contracted sounds, simply add any small vowel to any i-syllable (shi, chi, etc.) in order to make a whole new syllable. For example, チ chi + ェ e, creates: チェ che. And this time with katakana, you're allowed more freedom.

Also notice that with these small vowels, you can now make proper di and ti syllables by using テ te/デ de + ィ i! Now we can write "Disney" in Japanese! (which is 「ディズニー」. You're welcome.)

For the letter V:

We can use b sounds to replicate v, with the base being ヴ, the u character with a dakuten. As you can see above, the small vowels are combined with ヴ in order to produce all the v sounds we might need. Yeah, it's not the perfect v sound, but hey, it's something!

For the letter W:

Next up, we’ll use the same ウ character, only without dakuten. We already have a character for the wa sound (ワ) so there are only three characters above. Also, if we need to say wu, a plain ウ is exactly the same in Japanese.

Thinking about it... don't we already have wo? Yeah! ヲ is wo. Let me sort this out. ヲ exists as a counterpart to the hiragana, を, which is really pronounced as ō, not wo. If that confuses you, no worries, we'll discuss it further in future lessons. For now, just remember that ウォ is your go-to for any loan words with the wo sound.

For the letter F:

We've already got フ for the fu sound, so it makes sense that it'd work for the rest of the f-syllables! With it being the most straightforward, I saved it for last.

If this seems like a lot, don't worry. You'll only have to drill and worry about the contracted や, ゆ, and よ sounds, just like with hiragana. The other combinations are somewhat rarer and easy enough to pick up as you go!

And with that, you are officially done with all of the kana! I mean it! There is absolutely no more kana to study, ever. (Unless of course you want to get into classical Japanese.)

When studying katakana, you may lag a little behind hiragana and that's fine. We see hiragana more often, so it's only natural. As long as you can eventually read Japanese characters without peeking at any charts, you're good to go! Even if it takes you a few seconds! You'll pick up the pace by learning more katakana words as you continue your journey.

Summary

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  To make long vowels in katakana, add a dash (hyphen key when using Japanese IME) right after the syllable whose vowel you want to extend.

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  You can use small vowels to enrich katakana’s ability to reproduce loan words.

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  The sounds di and ti can be written in katakana as ディ and ティ.

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  For loan words that have v, katakana uses b sounds, made using the character ヴ + small vowels.

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  For loan words that have w, we make use of 「ウ + small vowels」.

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  The combination of 「ウ + ォ」 to make a wo sound is preferred over ヲ.

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  For loan words that have f, we make use of フ + small vowels.