3 Syllables or 4?

One reason (of many reasons) I don't like katakana as a way of transcribing English is that it adds syllables to words. For example, take the word "word". It's one syllable in English, but 3 in katakana. "Peace" and "needs" are the same.

Basically, a syllable in English can have 3 parts - an onset, a nucleus, and a coda.

A one-syllable word like "splat" breaks down like this:

SPL A T
onset nucleus coda

The nucleus is almost always a vowel. All syllables have a nucleus - but not all syllables have an onset or coda. The word "a" has only a nucleus.

The onset and coda consist of consonants - in the above case, "spl" and "t". Some combinations are allowed, and some are not. You'll never see a word in English spelled "lpsitc", but "splict" would be OK.

Of course, if you use katakana, all those parts become one syllable each. This makes correct pronunciation much harder to learn.