Originally Posted by mike jones
well theres 2 "alphabets" called hiragana and katakana. hiragana characters are used to express certain sounds and syllables (e.g. a, ka, sa, ta, ha...) and then katakana characters are also used to express syllables but they are used to express words that aren't really japanese (e.g. our names would be expressed with katakana characters, since they aren't of japanese origin). The last set of characters are called kanji. These are the difficult ones to remember, because each kanji corresponds to a unique word, instead of just to a syllable. Kanji are the big, elaborate looking characters. And thats your quick Japanese lesson for the day!