<i>"A U.K. company named Johnson Banks has come with an ingenious way to include English pronunciation in Japanese katakana characters."</i><p>Unfortunately, learning katakana characters doesn't get you anywhere close to "learning Japanese" (as the article's title suggests), since katakana is the writing system that's used for <i>foreign</i> words and other specialized uses.<p>According to Wikipedia:<p><i>"The katakana syllabary usage is quite similar to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals, and often Japanese companies."</i>[1]<p>To understand Japanese, you also need to learn kanji (the thousands of Chinese-derived pictographic characters) and hiragana.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana</a>