Japanese Word of the Day. Learn to speak Japanese word or phrase. List of Japanese Numbers. The Japanese Page. Getting Started. What is Japanese?
Well, let's try to put this simply... You can probably think of written Japanese pretty basically as 3 "alphabets", 2 of which are essentially the same, sort of like print and cursive for English. (Although unlike cursive in English, hiragana is used pretty much all the time in Japanese, at least in part... but we'll get to that in a moment!) First we'll explain kanji... kanji are basically the more complex looking characters and represent whole words or ideas, like "fish", "mountain", "journey" etc.. in one character.
Next we have the kana. Useful Expressions for Conversation.