JapaneseWriting consists of a mixture of four scripts:
	*Hiragana, a syllabary of about 46 characters that is used for grammatical particles and other things not expressed by Kanji.
	*Katakana, a syllabary that corresponds to Hiragana exactly, except that it looks almost completely different.  It is used mostly for foreign words and emphasis.
	*Kanji, which are borrowed Chinese characters and number in the thousands.  Most characters can be pronounced two different ways based on their usage, which makes the task of learning the Kanji even more laborious than just learning to recognize the characters and their meaning.
	*Romaji, which are the normal Roman characters.  Yes, strange but true, occasionally these are used in Japan. ''And they are often used ideographically: big companies, for example, often use romaji abbreviations as their names.'' For example, Sony, Nintendo. In general, Japanese people think English looks cool and hip. This is similar to the way American pop art has been adding in pseudo-japanese and chinese for years. 

Together, the hiragana and the katakana comprise the kana.

Though you need to know kanji to be considered literate, you can get far in Japan knowing only the kana.  And it takes only a short time to learn the kana with a good book, like James Heisig's "Remembering the Kana".  ISBN:0824831640
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[originally contentless, added relevant items from JapaneseLanguage (which please refactor if needed)] -DanNovak
Tamara