Katakana

In modern Japanese, katakana are most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages (called gairaigo). For example, "television" is written terebi (テレビ, terebi?). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names and foreign place and personal names. For example United States is written アメリカ Amerika and John is written ジョン (Jon).

Katakana are also sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent, by foreign characters, robots etc. For example, in a manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot may be represented by コンニチワ (konnichiwa) instead of the more usual hiragana こんにちは (konnichi wa).