Miageru

If you're just starting with Japanese, this will be the first page you want to learn.

In Japanese there are multiple writing systems which are used in almost all sentences. There is Kanji (characters taken over from chinese), Hiragana and Katakana.

Hiragana and Katakana are both phonetic writing systems. This means that the characters itself just stands for how something is pronounched (Just like these letters). Kanji is an exception, all characters have their own meaning and multiple ways of pronouncing them. View Kanji list.

Hiragana

Hiragana is mostly used for grammar elements and japanese vocab.

Some characters can be combined to make sounds otherwise not possible (Note that the second character is a bit smaller):

Note that some characters have the same pronunciation. To type them in on the computer, you have to use the characters between the ( ).

Katakana

This is used for vocab taken from other languages (Like english). It has some extra pronounce rules to allow foreign vocab to fit in the language. Although the vocab doesn't exactly sound the same, with a bit practice it is still possible to recognize some vocab.

Some characters can be combined to make sounds otherwise not possible (Note that the second character is a bit smaller):

Since an increasing number of foreign words, some new methods have been used in order to make the sound as close as possible to the original sound of foreign words.

Note that some characters have the same pronunciation. To type them in on the computer, you have to use the characters between the ( ).

Romaji

This is not really a Japanese writing system, but gets used more often in the modern times. Romaji are just characters like this.