Doubled Consonants

Now that we've memorised our Hiragana and Katakana charts, we move on to Sokuon (Doubled Consonants) before we can start our Grammar lessons.

つ or ツ is written in half it's size just before the consonant that should be stressed. The Doubled consonants that would be stressed are KK, PP, SS or TT.

For example:

けっこん (Kekkon) means marriage

さっか (Sakka) means writer
 

So the tsu extends a consonant that comes after it, meaning that you stress the consonant and articulate it for a longer period of time than the other letters.

NOTE:

When tsu is written half-sized, do not pronounce it as it only plays as an indicator to stress the next consonant.

For me it was easy to understand since we have the same thing in Arabic called Shadda and I think Russian have something similar as well.

The easiest way to understand it is by listening, so here is a video to help with the pronounciation:

For Katakana the tsu is obviously the smaller version of ツ, which would be ッ.