I have posted the Katakana words I found in the last post. There are a lot of them are insteresting. It actually fun that the moment you figure out which words it is just by keeping pronouncing or staring at each katakana character. But it can be painful in the quiz too I guess...
Anyway, during those words I found most of them are loanwords. たとえば, ミルク is milk, ソフトキャンデー is soft candy, ディズニーリソート is Disney Resort, コーヒーパウダ is coffee powder and so on. Of course, there is onoatopoeia, like ピカピカ as shinny, フワフワ as fluffy. For the third group, katakana for emphasis. I am not really sure about that. It is kind of hard to tell whether it belongs to loanwords or emphasis categories , and sometimes it counts for both. So I guess when Katakana words are written in large font or in bright color, such as on a poster (ハンコック -- Hankock) or magazine. The purpose is probably to emphasize, and of course it can be loanwords or onoatopoeia at the same time.
Two words I found most interesting are ディズニーリソート(Disney Resort) and ソフトキャンデー ( soft candy). One of them is on my 携帯（けいたい）ストラプ（strap) and the other one is from the 「北海道（ほうっかいどう）」candy bag. The reason why ディズニーリソート is written in Katakana, I think Disney is a place mostly for kids and Katakana are pretty simple, it's all about straight lines. Therefore, if it is written in Katakana, it will be easy to read and memorize(only for Janpanese I guess...They all look the same for me...) other than written in Hiragana, Kanji or English. Same reason for the other word ソフトキャンデー ( soft candy) written in Katakana first it is an English word and then for emphasis too. They are trying to let their customers notice that how ソフト their candy is and how much ミルク they put in too, so that customers like me will buy it.
Different textbooks introduce katakana in different ways. It might because the way to use Katakana is flexiable. It depends on people who use it. However, most of the textbooks have covered that the biggest use of katakana is for foreign words. For its other uses, I guess I'll just figure out as I am learning more and more Japanese.
ナナの日本（にほん）テレビのウェブサイト
大崎（おおさき）ナナ（ナナ）・・・・中島美嘉（なかしまみか）
じゃ、またあした！
