is a
Japanese syllabary, one component of the
Japanese writing system along with
hiragana,
kanji, and in some cases the
Latin script (known as
romaji). The word
katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both
kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly
mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character, or
kana, in each system. Each kana is either a vowel such as "
a" (katakana ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "
ka" (katakana ); or "
n" (katakana ), a
nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English
m,
n, or
ng , or like the
nasal vowels of
Portuguese.
