katakana.help
Katakana grew from fragments of kanji — カ, for example, comes from the left side of 加. Today Japanese uses it especially for words borrowed from other languages.
You can already read this.
Try one.
That was katakana. A whole menu, and nothing memorised.
Katakana is the angular script Japanese uses for borrowed words: coffee, taxi, beer, camera, most of a cafe menu and a good part of every convenience store shelf. Forty-six characters, and unlike kanji there is nothing to interpret — each character simply represents a sound.
That makes it the fastest useful thing to learn before a trip to Japan. Once the shapes are familiar, a menu stops being a wall and turns into a list of words you half knew already: ビール is beer, タクシー is taxi, コンビニ is the convenience store on the corner.
The catch is that flashcard drills teach the shapes without the places they live in. Reading レストラン on a card is not the same as reading it on a door at night.
Katakana doesn’t live on flashcards.
It lives on menus, signs, labels and screens.
katakana.help is a small Android app built around that idea.