Katakana Analysis

Okay, lets talk about Katakana!

For one of my Katakana sources, I brought Final Fantasy IV, one of the best in the series for those who know (Melissa maybe?). There's a lot of talk about crystals in the game, and whenever they're mentioned, the game writes it as クリストル. I tried to see if there was a word for crystal in Japanese and as far as I can tell, there is. Writing it in katakana doesn't really put any emphasis on the word in this case and it doesn't have to be a loan word so I was a little confused. Then I realized everything in the game was written in hiragana and katakana. No kanji. I'm not sure why this was done, maybe to save space in the original game cart. Anyway I can only assume that since the correct way to spell crystal in Japanese requires kanji, Squaresoft (the company who made the game) decided to use katakana so the word wouldn't look misspelled.

Yuxi brought song lyrics to class which included the words シアクセ　（Happiness), and イイヒト (good person). I believe both words can be written in Hiragana. But when people express their emotions in songs. Considering both of these words are things that could be expressed with emphasis, I guess writing them in Katakana makes the emotions in the song a little stronger. It's a little weird though, because it's impossible to tell how something is written when you're only listening to it. I don't know the song though. I guess the emotions would be apparent in the way it's being sung. If that's true, then the Katakana is probably there to make the written form match the way the song sounds.

さとうせんせい　told us Japanese was one of the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn. I guess every textbook has it's own approach to teaching it. I saw one that only used loan words for nouns in the first two chapters. This kind of book would have to give a pretty in depth description of katakana early on. Our book doesn't make a very big deal about the katakana, probably because most of it is in hiragana and kanji. I guess it all depends on how much the textbook intends to use katakana while teaching Japanese.