Katakana

Similar to hiragana, but with a tweaked system, katakana is what the Japanese use for foreign words and pronounciation.

The main uses of katakana are Chinese readings of kanji and adopted foreign words, although I have seen it used for much more and it is essencially interchangeable with hiragana.

Most of what you'll see are English and French loanwords (a trend that is now filling up the language) like ベッド (beddo, bed) and パン (pan, pain, bread). The Japanese have even adapted "thank you" and "bye-bye."

The usage is similar to hiragana but with a few extra tricks:

A dash is used to ellongate sounds rather than extra vowels (though they will use whatever combination works best), this will likely be written in romaji as an accented vowel or omitted.

To make up for the missing "v" sound, they usually use a "b," however, on special occation they use an accented "u," ヴ with a small vowel following it (as they have trouble pronouncing stand alone consonants).

Similarly, they use "fu," フ with a small vowel following it for variations of "f."

For variations of "w" they use an unaccented "u," ウ with a small vowel following it.

They use "chi," チ, "shi," シ and "ji," ジ with a small ェ following for che, she and je.

There are other variations, but they're not very important.

I suggest trying to figure out the word and adding Japanese pronounciation for reading and speaking (you can also guess some Japanese words this way).

Romaji

Romaji is the transliteration of Japanese to the Roman alphabet. It's a good tool for translation and pronunciation, but it's not as exact as it seems.

The most common way of Romanizing Japanese is by using English consonants and European vowels. While this is generally easy to use, it can often make it tricky to change it back to Japanese if you're not familiar with it.

Here are a few tips on reading romaji:

While most consonants are the same, the Japanese r is more like a quick l sound, and the f is lighter, more like exhaling or saying phew. (More a general tip for speaking Japanese)

The ん can be written as n or m depending on euphonics, but it's easy to figure out since it's the only vowel free character.

The small っ can be written as a double consonant, a double consonant with a hyphen in the middle or not at all. I suggest using a double consonant.

Combinations using y are written simply by omitting the i of the first syllable.

Ellongated vowel sounds can be written as the vowel, the vowel with an accent, the vowel doubled, or the vowel with the corresponding vowel used in Japanese (example, とう as tou). I suggest using an accent, although writting the corresponding vowel is good practice for your Japanese writting.

Euphonics will mess you up with kanji, that'll just be annoying.

Lession 3: Kana Usage

Alright, now that you're hopefully practicing your kana, I'm going to explain how to use them in combinations.

You've probably noticed that many kana have secondary (or even tritanary) soundings when using " (or °). This may seem confusing, but try sounding out ka and ga, or ha, ba and pa. The movements of your mouth are similar for similar kana. I would suggest learning k?+"=g? rather than adding more kana than I care to count to your chart. This also comes into play later in euphonics.
Another thing to notice is the ?i+y*=?y*. There's not much to explain here, it sounds cool. Again, learn the pattern or add another number of kana to your chart.
Next up are extended vowels. When you see any of these paterns, you extend the vowel sound: extended a=?a+a, extended i=?i+i, extended u=?u+u, extended e=?e+i and extended o=?o+u. Ifyou sound them out a few times, you might hear how this works.
And finally, there's the small tsu. If you see a small tsu, the next consonant is much more っPronounced.

Lesson 2: Writting Characters

Once you know how the language sounds (have you tried pronouncing a few phrases?), start learning hiragana (it's the general purpose kana). I did this by drawing out a chart like so (you might need to download a language pack to read this):

　あいうえお

　かきくけこ

　さしすせそ

　たちつてと

んなにぬねの

　はひふへほ

　まみむめも

　や　ゆ　よ

　らりるれろ

　わ　　　 を

A few things to take note of: I place ん in front of the n row to avoid that annoying habit of making another row that doesn't correspond to the rest of the chart, I don't include secondary and tritenary pronounciations (g, z, j, d, b, p), ?y? combinations or the archaic wi (ゐ) and we(ゑ). Most of these will be shown later with usage and euponics.

Once you get this chart right without cheating, start drawing out katakana as well. You could also try flashcards, but remember that recognizing and recalling are two different things.

Here's a chart I made for kana earlier this year, a, i, u, e, o and n are replaced by their kana, but I'm sure it's easy enough to understand.

Lesson 1: Getting used to the Language

Since at least four of my readers are currently trying to learn Japanese, I thought I'd offer some tips and tricks.

For starters, you need to learn kana, both hiragana and katakana, but before you start pouring into the stmbols, get used to romaji and how the language sounds and what kind of consonant-vowel combinations are common and cetera (I suggest finding an unlicensed anime and downloading it, or watching licensed anime with the Japanese audio.

Sorry, that's all for today, I'm late for class.