How to tell katakana シ, ツ, ソ and ン apart

Dots and direction

In my Japanese class in Tokyo, everyone had been studying for a year or two. During reading practice, my classmates and I would still stop for a few seconds on a シ or a ツ to work out which one it was. As I remember it, we got it wrong about half the time, me included. So this page gives you a rule to check, rather than a promise that the difference will one day look obvious.

Check two things, in this order: the short strokes, then the direction of the long one.

If you already read hiragana, し and つ help with the first pair. し ends in a sweep up to the right, like the long stroke of シ, and つ curls down to the left, like the long stroke of ツ.

Print hides which way a stroke was written, so read the slope instead. The long stroke of シ and ン lies flatter, closer to horizontal. The long stroke of ツ and ソ stands steeper, closer to vertical.

ノ settles the second pair. ノ (no) is one falling stroke, and ソ is that same stroke with a tick added at the top left.

Two things to test yourself on. シーツ (shiitsu, bed sheets) has both, シ first and ツ last. And the shrug emoticon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ uses ツ as its face, with the two dots on top where ツ keeps them.

If the scripts themselves still blur together, and not only these four shapes, start with the difference between hiragana and katakana. Once these four settle, the free katakana quiz tests all 104 katakana, then gives you 30 real loanwords to read.

Small tsu (ッ) is not ツ

A small tsu, ッ, sits low in the line and is not read tsu at all. It doubles the consonant after it, which puts a short beat before the next sound: ロボット (robotto, robot), ベッド (beddo, bed). Japan's official guidelines for writing loanwords, Gairaigo no hyōki (外来がいらい語ごの表記ひょうき, a 1991 Cabinet notice), spell that doubled consonant with a small ッ, as in カップ (kappu, cup). With a Japanese input method, type the consonant twice: kappu gives かっぷ, which converts to カップ. Hiragana っ works the same way; the guide to dakuten, handakuten and small っ has word pairs where the extra beat is the only difference.

Why they look alike

Most katakana grew out of pieces of kanji (漢字かんじ, Chinese characters) that Buddhist scholars wrote small beside their texts in the 9th century. These five came from different characters. ソ keeps the top of 曽 and ノ the first stroke of 乃. シ and ツ are whole characters reshaped: シ comes from 之, and ツ from 川 or 州, depending on the source. The origin of ン is disputed. With so little of each source still visible, the difference now comes down to where the short strokes sit and which way one line runs.