Katakana

Katakana (片仮名, カタカナ or かたかな?) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin script (known as romaji). Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems; they have corresponding character sets in which each kana, or character, represents one mora (one sound in the Japanese language). The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana is either a vowel such as "a" (katakana ア); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (katakana カ); or "n" (katakana ン), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n, or ng, or like the nasal vowels of French.