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).