Although I initially thought katakana was an inconvenience to learn, I have grown an appreciation for the it. I find it interesting that the Japanese language includes several foreign (English, German, etc) words. Whereas most languages would likely create their own word for a word that exists in another language, the Japanese language insists on leaving the origin of the foreign word the same while indicating its "foreignness" by writing it in a different character set.
I find it interesting that many sports in the Japanese language are written in katakana. The word "sports" itself is written as スポーツ. Activities such as ダンス (dance), ジョギング (jogging), フットボール (football), バスケット (basketball), and several others are all written in katakana, while baseball, for example, is written in hiragana (やきゅう). I think that the fact that certain words are written in hiragana and others are written in katakana also says something about the words themselves. For example, I believe that the fact that baseball is written in hiragana communicates something about how long baseball has been in Japan relative to how long the other sports (football, basketball, etc) have been.
