Learn how to read and write katakana characters, ヤ, ユ, ヨ
Get this lesson’s key vocab, their translations and pronunciations. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.
Unlock Lesson Notes and Transcripts for every single lesson. Sign Up for a Free Lifetime Account and Get 7 Days of Premium Access.
| みなさんこんにちは。(Mina-san, konnichiwa) Hi everyone, I am Chihiro and welcome back to JapanesePod101.com’s Kantan kana. In the last lesson, we learned the katakana characters マ(ma), ミ(mi), ム(mu), メ(me) and モ(mo). Be sure to review the last lesson if you don’t get confident with these. We are almost done with katakana. Today we are going to cover ヤ(ya), ユ(yu) and ヨ(yo). |
| We will begin with ヤ(ya). 1, 2. It kind of looks like an angular version of Hiragana や(ya), doesn’t it? In the katakana version, there is no short stroke on the top. Here is タイヤ(taiya), “a tire” for your car and here is ヤム(yamu), “yam”. |
| Next up is ユ(yu). 1, 2. It looks like an angular alphabetical letter U turned down upside, doesn’t it? Here is ユニーク(yunīku), “unique” and here is ユーモア(yūmoa), “humor”, an important thing to have. |
| Okay our last character today is ヨ(yo) which looks like a backwards capital “E” which won’t help you remember it but this is actually a trick tip because now you will remember it as ヨ(yo) the backwards “E”. Now you can write ヨーヨー(yōyō) which you probably guessed is a yo-yo and ツナマヨ(tsunamayo) which is a contraction of the word to tuna and mayonnaise, a popular food combination Japan. That’s all in your katakana today but before you go, I like to talk about one more thing. |
| Remember in lesson 12 when I talked about combined vowels, adding a small ヤ(ya), ユ(yu) orヨ(yo) after any character in the イ(i) row creates a combination sound or as you might have guessed, it works for katakana as well. Now you can read ショートケーキ(shōtokēki) which means strawberry shortcake and アマチュア(amachua) which is “amateur.” These combined sounds are really useful if you are from ニューヨーク(Nyūyōku) or New York. |
| Now let’s have a short quiz. I will show you the katakana and you read it. Bonus points if you remember what it means. |
| タイヤ(taiya), “a tire” |
| ヨーヨー(yōyō), “yo-yo” |
| ユニーク(yunīku), “unique” |
| Now it’s time for Chihiro’s tip. Some Japanese words are written in katakana even though they are not foreign words. For example, the word オススメ(osusume) means recommended and it is written a lot on menus. Katakana is used in this case because it adds emphasis to the word. Try and spot them. You might see them from time to time. |
| Have you ever danced サルサ(sarusa) or ridden on メトロ(metoro)? you will learn how to write both “salsa” and “metro” in the next lesson. I will see you then. |
Comments
Hide