Reading Japanese is daunting. In any sentence, there can be three different types of writing: hiragana, katakana and kanji. Here's a quick overview to help you learn read Japanese.
Hiragana
The hiragana are a set of 45 syllables (like "ka," "tsu" or "mo") and one consonant ("n"). They are used for native Japanese words and grammatical structures (words like "and" or "for"). You can recognize them by their simple, curving shapes.
Katakana
The katakana contain the same syllables and consonant as the hiragana. They are used for foreign loan words (like "hamburger" and "T-shirt"). Their shapes are more angular than the hiragana. Together, the two types of writing are called the kana.
Kanji
The kanji are symbols borrowed from Chinese. Each can have several different pronunciations depending on its context and whether it appears in a compound with another kanji. Over 50,000 kanji exist, but only about 2,000 are required to read a typical Japanese newspaper. You can usually spot kanji by their complicated shapes.
Where to Start
For an English-speaker, the most useful of the three to learn is the katakana. Knowing them, you can sound out a lot of English loan words. Learning both the katakana and hiragana can be accomplished in a week with a book like James Heisig's "Remembering the Kana."
Beyond the Kana
Seriously learning kanji requires much more effort. Some students recommend learning all 2,000 common-use kanji at once using a mnemonic method like Heisig's. Others suggest learning them as part of an integrated Japanese course.
