Reading Japanese Katakana Lesson 6: Mastering ム, ロ, チ, テ, デ, ナ, and メ

Welcome to Lesson Six of WordBrewery’s Reading Japanese: Katakana series. We have created a frequency list of Japanese words, then mined that list for the most common words that include only katakana characters. If you already read katakana, you can still learn from the vocabulary in this post series and use it to build your Japanese reading speed and fluency. But if you’re new to katakana, these posts will help you learn to read it quickly and accurately while picking up some useful vocabulary along the way.

This post presumes knowledge of the characters introduced in previous lessons of the Reading Japanese: Katakana series; each post defines only words that are appearing for the first time in the series.

*You may have noticed that the posts in this series are gradually getting longer. The reason is that, if you have followed this series since the beginning, you can now read almost all of the katakana characters. Since each word in this series includes only characters you have already studied.

Have you started studying real Japanese sentences on your own with WordBrewery yet? If not, go sign up and try it now (the first 50 sentences per month are free). Each sentence you understand and practice brings you one step closer to fluency.

The characters we’ve learned so far

Here are the katakana characters we have studied so far; read them aloud, and if you need more practice with any of them, review the previous lessons:

ア イ ウ エ オ ー ン ル ス ズ ト ド ラ フ ブ プ ク グ リ レ ツ ッ タ ダ コ ゴ シ ジ ホ ボ ポ マ ヒ ビ ピ

Seven more common katakana syllables

Today we will meet the following new katakana characters:

ム ロ チ テ デ ナ メ

ム | mu (“moo” with a short “u”)

ロ | ro (“roh” as in “pro”)

チ | chi (“moo” with a short “u”)

テ | te (“teh” as in “television”)

デ | de (“deh” as in “dead or “desperate)

ナ | na (“nah” as in “not” or “Namaste”)

メ | me (“apmeh” as in “metro”)