The katakana syllabary is used today primarily to write foreign words and names in Japanese. Like hiragana, katakana first developed from efforts to use Chinese characters to "spell out" the sounds of Japanese words.
The first people to use katakana were probably Japanese scholars of Buddhism. While studying Chinese Buddhist texts, they would make notes in the margins in Japanese. Writing out a whole Chinese character to represent just one syllable of a Japanese word was time-consuming, so they
soon began writing just one portion of the kanji to stand for the whole thing. This shorthand-style of writing kanji led to the development of the katakana syllabary.
On the left in the boxes below are examples of the kanji that these scholars originally used to write the sounds "ta," "ru," and "mo" in Japanese. To the right of each kanji is the modern katakana symbol for that sound. Place your mouse over the katakana to highlight the part of the kanji it was based on.
