The Japanese use three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. In this class, we will learn the katakana system. Children in Japan learn first to read hiragana, followed by katakana. By learning katakana, one opens the door to more vocabulary and can read foreign words in the Japanese lexicon. Like the hiragana, the katakana characters are also known as syllabaries and are different from the letters we use in the English alphabet. If one knows all the katakana syllabaries in a word,...