Japanese Writing (日本語の文章)
The Japanese writing system is comprised of three main written scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Writing might be one of the most difficult, but also fun, parts of learning Japanese. The Japanese don't use an alphabet. Instead, there are three types of scripts in Japanese: kanji, hiragana and katakana. The combination of all three is used for writing.
Source: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/writing
The Scripts
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HIRAGANA (ひらがな)
Hiragana is the main phonetic writing system used to represent every distinct sound in Japanese. Because of its phonetic nature, we will first learn Hiragana to also learn how to pronounce all the sounds in the Japanese language.The entire Hiragana syllabary categorized by the consonant and vowel sounds. With the exception of a few sounds , most sounds in Japanese are easily represented by a vowel or consonant-vowel. There is also one consonant-only sound: 「ん」.
Source: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/writing More on Hiragana -
KATAKANA (カタカナ)
Katakana represents the same sounds as Hiragana, it is mainly used to represent words imported from other languages. We’ve already learned all the sounds when we learned Hiragana. All you need to learn is a different way of writing them.
Source: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/writing
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KANJI (漢字)
Kanji, which are Chinese characters adapted for Japanese, are heavily used in writing. There are no spaces in Japanese so Kanji is necessary in order to separate the words within a sentence. Kanji is also useful for distinguishing homophones, which occurs quite often given the limited number of distinct sounds in Japanese.
Source: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/writing
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