There are 3 kinds of characters in Japanese: HIRAGANA, KATAKANA, and KANJI. All three characters can be seen in a single sentence.
Example:
テレビを見ます。
Watch television.
テレビ - (Katakana)
見 - (Kanji)
ます - (Hiragana)
Hiragana and Katakana are like alphabets, each characters represent sounds. As you can see above, Hiragana has a roundish shape and is used for conjugation endings, function words and native Japanese words not covered by Kanji.
Katakana on the other hand has rather straight lines and is normally used for writing loanwords and foreign names. I find it hard to read Katakana than Hiragana and you'll be surprised how Japanese converts an English word to its corresponding Japanese words using Katakana.
Kanji or Chinese Characters, represent not just sounds but also meanings. Mostly, Kanji are for nouns and the stems of the verb and adjectives. Sometimes even if you cannot read the word you can understand the word because of its Kanji. Kanji is the hardest among the three, because each kanji can have 2 or more readings plus each characters has many strokes.
I have uploaded a Hiragana and a Katakana chart on my Google Docs and you may access it here.
The good thing about those charts is that you can see the stroke order of each characters. It is a good practice to follow the right stroke order specially if you are writing a Kanji. Another good practice would be practice writing on equally square box at first, something like this
This would enable you to write all characters properly. All the characters including Kanji no matter how complicated it is has the same width and height.
In addition to basic Hiragana and Katakana characters, there are also Hiragana and Katakana with Diacritical marks and Hiragana and Katakana from contracted sounds. You can transcribe 23 additional sounds per writing system by adding diacritical marks. With a pair of short diagonal strokes ("), the unvoiced consonants k,s,t and h becomes voiced consonants g,z,d and b respectively. The consonant h changes to p with the addition of a small circle. Small や,ゆ, and よ for Hiragana and ヤ,ユ, and ヨ for Katakana follow after letters in the second column (i-vowel Hiragana and Katakana, except い) and are used to transcribe contracted sounds. The contracted sound represents s single syllable.
Hiragana with Diacritical Marks
Hiragana Contracted Sounds
Katakana with Diacritical Marks
Katakana with Contracted Sounds
The best way to memorize each character is by writing them and reading them afterwards. If you are certain that you already memorize Hiragana and Katakana you can test your self through this online flash cards.
If you already mastered Hiragana and Katakana you can now proceed to our next lesson.
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