Learn Katakana by reading real words
Well, that's the idea of this site, anyway. It's very much a work in progress. But I thought it would be more fun to just put something up right away and get some reactions than to sit around working alone.
Here's how this site works:
- You progress through "levels" consisting of lists of words written in Katakana.
- At each level, a new Katakana "letter" (syllable, really, but whatever) is introduced.
- All words from the (huge) wordlist which can be spelled using only that letter and letters from previous lessons are listed. For example, by level 10 you will have seen アトルリンス・ー , and at level ten you will add イ. With those letters you know enough to read スイス, イーリアス, トイ・ストーリー, and a couple dozen more words.
- For now, clicking the word will take you to the corresponding article on the Japanese Wikipedia. I'll be adding more content related to the words here as time goes on. (I want to add images from Flickr).
Because it's automatically generated (the content is based on the titles of articles in the Japanese Wikipedia and their linked English "equivalents"), right now there are some rather weird words in here (for instance, Japanese transliterations of the names of ancient Egyptian gods, small towns in Botswana, etc etc). I'm going to have to figure out some way to weed out the words that would probably be meaningless to the learner even if they were written in the Roman script in the first place.
Still, the levels are "programmatic" in the sense that each level contains only the letters that have been seen before, plus one additional letter. So for someone trying to improve their command of Katakana it might be a fun thing to try to see how many of the words are sensible.
The content and code of this website is free. Everything I put together is under a Creative Commons Attribution license, as will be any images from Flickr. Some of the content from Wikimedia Commons may be under the GFDL. I'm trying to figure out how to cite all this stuff correctly, please bear with me and corrections welcome.
Site by Patrick Hall pathall@gmail.com