カタカナ Expressions

Once we learned hiragana, I thought that we would be using that for the most part but when I started to look things up I found out that katakana is used just as much as hiragana is. This surprised me mainly because I know that many languages will create their own words for foreign words or at least assimilate the word but Japanese not only tries to stay close to the original but also distinguishes it from the Japanese words/ "alphabet." For example, soccer is known as football almost everywhere else in the world but for English it has a different name altogether. Whereas in Japanese, a sport like basketball has the katakana name ベスケットボール. I was also surprised to see some words that I would have imagined would be in hiragana to actually be in katakana. For instance Pokemon is written ポケットモンスターオフィシャルサイト despite the series having originated from Japan. I appreciate katakana much more now that I have seen its applications in Japanese and actually thought about what the purpose of even developing katakana.