Japanese Language

The Japanese Language consists of three different phonetic scripts: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

Hiragana, which means "rounded" or "easy", is a phonetic script which is much like English where each character has a unique sound and the characters can be written one after the next to spell out a word.  Hiragana is first to be taught when learning how to read and write Japanese. Hiragana is used to write the grammatical parts of words or sentences and write Japanese words that do not have a kanji equivalent.

Katakana, like hiragana, is a phonetic script like English where every character has a unique sound and can be written together to spell out a word. Learning katakana is usually the second step in learning how to read and write Japanese, but hiragana is usually taught first. Katakana is used to represent foreign words that have been adopted into the Japanese Language and foreign names.

Kanji, which means Chinese letter or character, was invented by the Chinese and adopted by the Japanese around the middle of the 6th century AD as the first writing method in Japan. Kanji were originally drawn as pictures from nature but eventually transformed into more generalised representations. Kanji have different two readings “on” yomi (Chinese reading) and “kun” yomi (Japanese reading). Kanji are ideograms; that is each character has its own meaning rather than just sounds and corresponds to a word. By combining kanji, more words can be created, such as, "electricity" and "car" meaning "train". There are several ten thousands of kanji characters, of which 2000 to 3000 are required to understand newspapers. A set of 2136 kanji characters has been officially declared as the "kanji for everyday use".

References:
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2046.html
http://www.declan-software.com/japanese/what_is_kanji.htm
http://www.declan-software.com/japanese/what_is_hiragana.htm
http://www.declan-software.com/japanese/what_is_katakana.htm