Japanese Part 2

In Japanese there are 3 types of letters/words. They are hiragana, katakana, kanji (ひらがな, カタカナ, 漢字)
Those who look carefully may be able to notice a difference.
Yes, hiragana normally are the 'curviest', with a lot of rounded lines.
Katakana, on the other hand are slightly more straight. If you look and compare all of hiragana and katakana, you should be able to notice this difference.
And finally kanji are obviously much more complicated than the other two. Kanji originally derived from chinese characters. However there are many chinese symbols that are not used in Japan and some vice versa.

Hiragana are used for letters and words that do not have an obvious kanji to write them with. Kanji are used for nouns, the main part of verbs and adverbs, and the main part of adjectives etc. School, port and bridge (学校,　港,　橋)are just 3 words that can be written using only kanji. A combination of hiragana and kanji are used often like when you say 'I ran' 走りました. Katakana are mainly used for foreign words, including names and objects like camera (カメラ)
The 'alphabet' of hiragana and katakana are exactly the same.
There are thousands of kanji.

Also, there is something called romaji that is used when foreigners first start to learn Japanese. Romaji is where Japanese is written using the English/American/European alphabet. If you see something like 'take' written in romaji like so, you would not pronounce it like the English 'take', but pronounce it by dividing it up into a combination of 2 or 3 letters each. In this case that would be 'ta-ke'.
Romaji is not often used in Japan, although you may see it being used in the major cities like Tokyo, specifically for tourists in trains, stations, bus stops and road signs but make sure you don't rely on this too much.

The hiragana alphabet is as follows.　The left alphabet should be read like reading English - Left to right, top to bottom.

あ　い　う　え　お                   
a     i     u    e    o                           
か　き　く　け　こ　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
ka   ki  ku  ke  ko                              
さ　し　す　せ　そ　　　　　
sa  shi   su  se    so           
た　ち　つ　て　と　　　　　　　　　　　
ta   chi  tsu  te   to                             
な　に　ぬ　ね　の　　　　　　　
na   ni   nu   ne  no                 
は　ひ　ふ　へ　ほ
ha   hi   fu    he   ho
ま　み　む　め　も
ma  mi  mu  me  mo
や　　　ゆ　　　よ
ya        yu        yo
ら　り　る　れ　ろ
ra   ri    ru   re   ro
わ　　　　　　　　を
wa                     o　　
　　　　ん
          m/n


As, you can see, there are some spaces 'missing'. This is spaces for some old hiragana that is mainly not used anymore. Some versions of hiragana alphabet do still include the missing ones but in reality you do not actually need to know them.

More later...