Japanese Scripts

Japanese writing system has four different scripts:

Hiragana 平仮名- Main alphabet. Pure Japanese words, and prefixes & suffixes of Kanji
Katakana 片仮名- Mainly foreign originated words
Kanji 漢字- Chinese characters which were incorporated into the Japanese language
Romaji ローマ字- Roman characters for numbers, measurement units, or initials.

Hiragana is the first system children learn at school, though Katakana is considered easier because of its simpler form. Kanji 漢字 is a Japanese term for a Chinese character. Japanese adopted Chinese characters as part of their writing system around the fourth century. Despite Kanji characters in the Japanese language, Chinese and Japanese do not belong to the same language families, and are structurally and linguistically NOT related at all. The simplified version of Chinese characters currently used in China is not identical to Japanese Kanji either. The same Kanji characters can be read in multiple ways based on their pronunciation or meanings. This makes it difficult even for Japanese to master Kanji!! Kanji will sometimes has its Hiragana pronunciation on top for proper pronunciation.