All About Katakana (Power Japanese Series) (English and Japanese Edition) - Softcover

Stewart, Anne Matsumoto

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9784770016966: All About Katakana (Power Japanese Series) (English and Japanese Edition)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 4770016964 ISBN 13: 9784770016966

Publisher: Kodansha USA Inc, 1993

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Katakana should be the easiest way to approach the Japanese written language since it is used to write all kinds of loanwords that the reader is already familiar with. However, until recently katakana has been taught as if students of the language were all Japanese kindergarten or elementary school kids--ready, more-or-less willing, and having the time and motivation to learn the traditional katakana chart by rote.

With the present book, as soon as individual characters are introduced, they are immediately used to form actual, commonplace, everyday words. Thus, from the very first page of Lesson 1, the reader of this book is able not only to read and write two characters, but to read several words formed with those characters. Each succeeding lesson adds to the number of katakana that one can read and write, and as a matter of course to the student's functional vocabulary. With the dual Japanese-English and English-Japanese glossaries at the end of the book, the reader has more than a thousand words at his or her command. Quizzes are included for those who wish to test their progress and reinforce what they have learned. Thanks to All About Katakana, katakana is now a snap.

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Preface [slightly abridged and minus katakana]

As useful as it is to casual learners of the Japanese language, and as necessary to serious students, katakana frequently does not receive the close attention that it deserves. The serious student, studying in school where hiragana and kanji maintain pride of place, is often left with a less than perfect introduction to the katakana syllabary. The casual learner (the tourist, business person, etc.), ignorant of katakana's function as a means of transcribing loanwords from English and other languages, remains unaware of its usefulness in acquiring a knowledge of much practical, everyday written Japanese as encountered, for example, in restaurants and hotels. It is for these two divergent types of reader that the present book was written.

One of the primary functions of katakana is for marking native Japanese words for emphasis, much as italics is used in English. Another related function, as mentioned above, is the transcription of loanwords, such as "cake," "pie," and "hamburger." It is such words as this, of which there are a considerable number, that the casual learner will eventually be able to pick up after going through this book. Once the means of transcription has been learned--that is, katakana--the meanings of the words themselves can often (but not always) be deduced by anyone who knows English or whatever other language the word has been borrowed from. Thus the casual learner, with a little effort, will be able to distinguish the names of many "Western food" restaurants and decipher many of the items on the menu, and in general to read and acquire for speaking purposes many words with practical application. The aim of the present book is thus to teach three things: one, the reading (recognition) of the individual katakana characters; two, the writing of these characters; three, the combination of the characters into actual words. To accomplish the latter end, katakana has been introduced not in the traditional order (which limits the number of words that can be constructed, especially in the primary stage), but in a order that facilitates the building of vocabulary as the student moves from lesson to lesson and adds new characters to his or her repertoire. Exercises are included with each lesson to reinforce and test the reader's mastery of what has been presented to that point.

Following the main text is an appendix of useful vocabulary, categorized for easy reference. Some of these categories concern food, brand names, and barber shops and beauty parlors, areas of particular interest to those making their way through the maze of everyday life in a foreign country. The list of composers, painters, etc., though of less apparent practical use, illustrates the differences between Anglicized and katakana-ized versions of some well-known proper names. The appendix is succeeded by two longish glossaries (katakana-English and English-katakana), which include all the vocabulary items that appear in the book as well as a good deal more. These glossaries will, it is hoped, prove helpful to both casual and serious readers either as practical references or simply as additional vocabulary to be studied at leisure.

Readers who are approaching katakana for the first time will want to proceed from the Preface to the Introduction for further orientation. More experienced students might decide to go straight to the body of the book without loss, for the basic approach employed there is fairly self-explanatory....

[Here is one section from the Introduction.]

Structure of the Book [minus the macrons in the original] In this book, katakana characters are not introduced in traditional order (which is shown in Table 1, p. 18). Rather, they are presented in a new order that facilitates the reading and writing of meaningful words from the very first lesson. Lessons 1-4 present the basic katakana one or two at a time, beginning with a demonstration of how to write the characters. With each katakana presented, there is a list of words using that character as well as the characters already presented; the words are transcribed in Roman alphabet, and English glosses are given. Review exercises are provided at the end of each lesson. Lessons 5-8 cover diacritics and other variations and, like the earlier lessons, include word lists and exercises.

Japanese words have been transcribed in the Roman alphabet (roomaji ) using a modification of the Hepburn romanization system. Although there are other romanization systems, the Hepburn system was chosen for this book since it is used in most Japanese-English dictionaries. The modification concerns the representation of long vowels: instead of using a macron, long vowels are spelled out in full (toosuto).

Language Notes:

Text: English, Japanese

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