The Katakana alphabet consists of 46 basic characters, making it one of the core scripts of the Japanese writing system. Developed around the 9th century, Katakana is primarily used for foreign loanwords, onomatopoeia, and emphasis. Like Hiragana, Katakana is a phonetic script where each character represents a specific sound.
The alphabet includes characters like ア (A), カ (Ka), サ (Sa), and タ (Ta). Katakana is often used alongside Hiragana and Kanji in modern Japanese texts, particularly for writing words borrowed from other languages, such as コーヒー (coffee) or テレビ (television).
The Katakana script consists of 104 letters in total, broken down into 46 basic characters, 25 dakuten and handakuten characters, and 33 contracted sounds (yōon).
While Katakana does not have its own unique numeric system, it can be used to phonetically write native Japanese number words. However, numbers in Japanese are typically written using Kanji (Chinese characters) or Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.). Additionally, Katakana includes a few special characters for specific purposes.