Japanese Alphabet

Japanese uses kanji for a large amount of it's written language. Kanji is another way of saying Chinese characters. These characters were adapted from the Chinese language, but often have a very different sound when used in Japanese. The Japanese also developed a phonetic alphabet to use in conjunction with kanji characters. This phonetic alphabet used with kanji is called hiragana, but there are other phonetic alphabets too.

When I learned to speak Japanese I started with understanding romaji, hiragana, and katakana. These three alphabets will help you get a firm foundation in the Japanese language. Fortunately, they sound exactly the same so memorizing them isn't as difficult as it first appears.