Japanese characters consist of two scripts, hiragana and katakana, which represent sounds, and kanji, which represent meanings or words. You may think that katakana is not necessary because you can make sounds into letters with just the hiragana that you learned as a beginner. Katakana is mainly used to represent words whose origins are of a foreign language other than that of Chinese, and is often used for the names of animals and plants. In ancient times, Japan adopted the characters (kanji) from China. Initially, they ignored the meaning of the kanji and used kanji that had sounds similar to Japanese sounds to form the Japanese language. However, the construction of the kanji was complicated, hard to write and consequently, only partial components were extracted and used for writing. This is the beginning of katakana. Many of the katakana characters not only represent the sounds of the Japanese language, but are also used as part of the composition of kanji. Some of the characters are also used as kanji, such as “タ(ta)” for “夕(yuu)” and “ロ(ro)” for “口(kuchi). ”Additionally, there are also katakana combinations that form kanji characters, such as “ナ(na)” and “ロ(ro)” for “右(right)” and “ナ(na)” and “エ(e)” for “(left).” As you can see, there are many elements in katakana that form the basis for kanji. In addition, katakana has the convenience of representing the sounds of any language. The original pronunciation sounds of foreign words are slightly different in the Japanese language due to the fitting of katakana pronunciations.