Learning the Hiragana, one of the Japanese phonetic alphabets is key to learning basic Japanese.
Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな) is one component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet (Rōmaji.) Hiragana consists of 46 signs which originally were kanji (Chinese character) but were simplified over the centuries. When looking at a Japanese text, one can clearly distinguish the two kinds of signs: the complicated kanji and the simpler kana signs.
Even though one can theoretically write the whole language in hiragana, it is usually used only for grammatical endings of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, as well as for particles, and several other original Japanese words which are not written in kanji. Hiragana are widely used in materials for children, textbooks, animation and comic books, to write Japanese words which are not normally written with kanji, such as adverbs and some nouns and adjectives, or for words whose kanji are obscure or obselete. Also, if you forget certain kanji which are rarely used, you may substitute hiragana for them.
Hiragana are also sometimes written above or along side kanji to indicate pronunciation, especially if the pronunication is obscure or non-standard. Hiragana used in this way are known as furigana. In horizontal texts, the furigana appear above the kanji and in vertical texts, the furigana appear on the right of the kanji.
Among the syllables are the five vowels (a i u e o). (a), pronounced “ahh”, (i), pronounced like “e” in “eat”, (u), pronounced like “oo” in “soon”, (e), pronounced like “e” in “elk”, and (o), pronounced “oh”. All Hiragana characters end with one of these vowels, with the exception of (n). The rest are syllables combined by one of these vowels with a consonant (ka ki ku ke ko ra ri ru re ro…).
For a list of the Hiragana syllabograms, please refer to the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana