Unusual Katakana and Their Origins blog.gaijinpot.com

By Matthew Coslett Dec 3, 2019 3 min readAs learners explore the weird and wonderful world of katakana words, it can easily lead to a false sense of confidence.
But with technology and social media, increasingly stranger kana have started to appear that form a new and unique category.
These are the kind of katakana taken from other languages where the original meaning has been changed to something uniquely Japanese.
One of my favorite word origins has always been シャープペンシル (a mechanical pencil).
So next time you’re trying to process some katakana out loud, just know that it could come from a language you’re not familiar with!