Hi betita03 Japanese consists of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana is the basic Japanese script schoolchildren learn whereas Kanji are the characters loaned from Chinese. Katakana is used to write foreign words such as McDonalds, coffee etc. If you want to understand written Japanese you have to know all these three alphabets. Hiragana is by far the easiest and can be learned in a couple of hours. Kanji on the other hand consists of thousands of characters and may take you years to write/read/memorize. I hope I could help you with my answer. Greetz Lingolino