In modern Japanese, katakana is most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages or loanwords (other than words historically imported from Chinese), called gairaigo. For example, "television" is written テレビ (terebi).
How do you know when to use katakana?
Katakana is more frequently used in loan words, while hiragana is used for native words.
- Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root) to form words with kanji. ...
- Katakana is frequently used in scientific words, animal names, foods, and company names.
How useful is katakana?
Katakana is used for lonewords and foreign names. It is necessary to learn since Katakana is used fairly often. Since it isn't that difficult, I would advice you to learn it now along side hiragana and save yourself the frustrations of not understand certain words or senctences just because it uses Katakana.
