Many people say, “Japanese language is difficult”. The reason may be due to Japanese language consists of not one, but three different alphabets. Modern Japanese is written with a mixture of hiragana and katakana and kanji. It may also include romaji or Roman letters.
Japanese writing has evolved from its original Chinese script beginnings to become something that is intrinsically Japanese. There are actually different types or ways of writing Japanese characters and it has been a source of confusion for people who are not familiar with Japanese culture.
The three ways of writing Japanese characters are Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana, with another version called Romaji being used for special purposed.
The word kanji is a Japanese derivative of the Chinese word hanzi, which translates to “Han characters”. Kanji are not syllabic and are used to represent abstract concepts as well as names and everyday words.
Hiragana are used for words without kanji representation, for words no longer written in kanji. It is a syllabic alphabet. Each Hiragana character represents a sound.
Katakana like hiragana, are a syllabary; katakana are primarily used to write foreign words.
There is also another script used in the Japanese language called Romaji. It is basically used to write the Latin alphabet into Japanese characters, especially for English or Latin alphabet-spelled words that do not have a direct Japanese translation.