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New font lets anyone learn Japanese

• greenyoda 11y ago
  "A U.K. company named Johnson Banks has come with an ingenious way to include English pronunciation in Japanese katakana characters." Unfortunately, learning katakana characters doesn't get you anywhere close to "learning Japanese" (as the article's title suggests), since katakana is the writing system that's used for foreign words and other specialized uses. According to Wikipedia: "The katakana syllabary usage is quite similar to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals, and often Japanese companies."[1] To understand Japanese, you also need to learn kanji (the thousands of Chinese-derived pictographic characters) and hiragana. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana