Katakana

The katakana alphabet is tonally identical to the hiragana alphabet. Katakana, however, is used for foreign words. I thought it would be interesting to look at the McDonalds menu in Japanese. I first noted that nearly every word on the menu was written in katakana. Like the hiragana alphabet, katakana is used in the #1 Big mac combo(small tsu). One of the biggest differences in alphabets was the use of hyphens for words with long vowels found throughout the menu.

            The most interesting word on the menu was French fries. I would’ve guessed the katakana pronunciation to be “hurenchi huraizu”. Instead the correct katakana word is simply “Poteto”.  Another interesting discovery was the use of the letter Q under the 4^th beverage in the drink menu.