Learn Katakana
After you learn Hiragana, the next step is to learn Katakana.
Sometimes people get confused about Why the Japanese language has Hiragana and Katakana. What is the purpose of having two separate writing systems for the same sounds?
Think of it like the difference between print and cursive writing or between lowercase and uppercase letters. We use print for official forms and cursive for casual handwriting; we use uppercase letters for the beginnings of sentences or proper nouns and lowercase letters for everything else. Katakana and Hiragana are similar.
While Hiragana is used for native Japanese words, Katakana is used for borrowed words from other languages, sounds, technical terms, and it is sometimes used for emphasis.
Below you’ll find a chart of the basic Katakana characters.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Table_katakana.svg
Much like Hiragana, the best way to learn Katakana is to take it a few symbols at a time. Start with the first row and work your way through at your own pace until you’ve mastered all of them.
And just like Hiragana, you’ll want to practice writing the symbols with the appropriate stroke order.
Another great thing will happen when you learn Katakana. You can suddenly read a lot of foreign words in Japanese. Unlike Hiragana where you find that you can read words out loud but you have no idea what those words mean, many words written in Katakana are actually borrowed from English. By simply sounding them out, you can suddenly find yourself actually reading and understanding a few Japanese words after only sitting down to learn Katakana for a few minutes.
Below are a few Japanese words written in Katakana that you can sound out to figure out their English meanings.
<insert table here>
Foreign names are also written in Katakana as well. For example, my name (Billy) can be written as <insert symbols> (literally “Bi-ri”). Take a moment and see if you can write your name phonetically using Katakana letters.
Now you can write your name and read a few simple words borrowed from English. Things are starting to get fun now, aren’t they?
After you’ve gotten a good grasp on both Hiragana and Katakana, you should be able to take notes on Japanese grammar and vocabulary entirely without the use of Romaji (the English alphabet). This not only gives you more of a chance to practice writing Japanese characters, but it will help you get used to thinking in Japanese. Believe it or not, most people actually find that it is easier to read Japanese when they are reading actually Japanese characters instead of Romaji.
So from here on out, do your best to stop using the English alphabet when you are writing Japanese words or sentences. It will really help you out in the long-run.