>By the way Japanese don't encounter all katakana sentences, since it's just used for the 'imported' words. As patio mentions, that's a common misconception. W

>By the way Japanese don't encounter all katakana sentences, since it's just used for the 'imported' words. As patio mentions, that's a common misconception. When computers were first being developed for Japan, they used a half-width katakana font in order to fit in a smaller byte-size, and also be able to be displayed on small screens such as cash registers. This has carried over, and many appliances, printers, atms, etc still use the half-width katakana for display. It is truly a pain in the butt. Sometimes all-katakana sentences are also used in books for when robots, aliens or foreigners are talking in order to give the speech a halting or "non-japanese" feel to it. I personally find it obnoxious, and like the Full Metal Alchemist way of dealing with it, where they only changed the last character of each line into katakana. Katakana can also be used as english-speakers would use italics (or even all caps) in order to put stress on a certain word in a sentence. かれのスタイルはサイコー！ >You need to know 2000 characters before you can start reading the newspaper. Honestly, for foreigners this is considered a huge hurdle, but 2000 characters is nothing. Especially for a native, who will have about 12~ years of learning before they start reading newspapers, it's really not a big deal.