COMPILED BY アリフ
Japanese consists of two alphabets (or kana) called hiragana and katakana, which are two versions of the same set of sounds in the language. Hiragana and katakana consist of a little less than 50 "letters", which are actually simplified Chinese characters adopted to form a phonetic alphabet. Chinese characters, called kanji in Japanese, are also heavily used in the Japanese writing. Most of the words in the Japanese written language are written in kanji (nouns, verbs, adjectives). There exists over 40,000 kanji where about 2,000 represent over 95% of characters actually used in written text. There are no spaces in Japanese so kanji is necessary in distinguishing between separate words within a sentence. Kanji is also useful for discriminating between homophones, which occurs quite often given the limited number of distinct sounds in Japanese. Hiragana is used mainly for grammatical purposes. We will see this as we learn about particles. Words with extremely difficult or rare kanji, colloquial expressions, and onomatopoeias are also written in hiragana. It's also often used for beginning Japanese students and children in place of kanji they don't know. While katakana represents the same sounds as hiragana, it is mainly used to represent newer words imported from western countries (since there are no kanji associated with words based on the roman alphabet). The next three sections will cover hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/writingsys.html
Japanese is spoken by 126 million people mainly in Japan but also in 26 other countries including American Samoa, Argentina, Australia, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Dominican Republic, Germany, Guam, Mexico, Micronesia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines and Taiwan. Japanese has no known linguistic relatives though is possibly distantly related to the Altaic family of languages, which includes Korean, Mongolian and Turkic languages. Japanese is not related to Chinese, though it does contain a huge number of Chinese 'loan' words, in fact perhaps 50% of the words used in Japanse are of Chinese origin. Since the mid 18th century the Japanese have adopted a huge amount of gairaigo: foreign words mainly from English. These include tēburu (table), bīru (beer), gurasu (glass), aisu (ice), takushī (taxi) and hoteru (hotel). There are also a few words from Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish, such as pan (bread), from the Portuguese pão. Such words arrived in Japan mainly during the 16th and 17th centuries, when missionaries and merchants started to visit the country. One notable feature of Japanese is the tendency to create new words by shortening and/or combining English words. Examples include wāpuro (word processor), sarariman ("salary man" = a male corporate employee), OL, pronounced ōeru ("office lady" = a female corporate employee) and masukomi (mass communications). http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_language.htm
ひらがな
https://goo.gl/jXJvnM
Learning the two Japanese phonetic alphabets, hiragana and katakana, are key to learning basic Japanese. Each hiragana character represents a single vowel or consonant-vowel sound. In the chart below you can see all of the basic hiragana characters along with the closest sounding roman letters.
The five vowel sounds, a (ah), i (ee), u (oo), e (eh), o (oh), are combined with the consonant sounds k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w to produce almost all the sounds represented by hiragana characters. The consonant-only n character appears at the end of words. These characters were all originally written with a brush, so writing the strokes of a hiragana character in the right order is important in getting the shape of the character correct.
https://goo.gl/mho8ef
The katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and was originally considered "men's writing". Since the 20th century, katakana have been used mainly to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic words, foreign names, in telegrams and for emphasis (the equivalent of bold, italic or upper case text in English). Before the 20th century all foreign loanwords were written with kanji.
Japanese is written using several different kinds of characters for different purposes. English-style (Roman) letters are called romaji. These are sometimes used for trademarks, advertising slogans, and commands to some old-fashioned computers. The kana are simpler symbols that stand for sounds. There are two kinds of kana: hiragana and katakana. The hiragana characters are written in a curving, flowing style. They are used for writing some native Japanese words and word endings. The katakana are more angular characters. They are used mostly for writing foreignderived words. Words adapted into Japanese from English or other European languages are usually written in katakana.
Many words may be written in either kanji or kana depending on the educational level of the writer and readers. Kana are used most heavily in documents for people who do not know many kanji yet, such as Japanese children. Also, kana are sometimes written above difficult or obscure kanji, to explain the meaning of the kanji. Usually each kana symbol stands for one syllable. (There are a few kana characters that stand not for syllables, but for modifications to other syllables.) To develop a full understanding of the relationship between kana and their sounds, you will need to study spoken Japanese so that you will understand the system of sounds. The best way to learn spoken Japanese is to study with a skilled teacher who is fluent in the language.
.
Intonation As you will find out in the next section, every character in Hiragana (and the Katakana equivalent) corresponds to a [vowel] or [consonant + vowel] syllable sound with the single exception of the 「ん」 and 「ン」 characters (more on this later). This system of letter for each syllable sound makes pronunciation absolutely clear with no ambiguities. However, the simplicity of this system does not mean that pronunciation in Japanese is simple. In fact, the rigid structure of the fixed syllable sound in Japanese creates the challenge of learning proper intonation.
Intonation of high and low pitches is a crucial aspect of the spoken language. For example, homophones can have different pitches of low and high tones resulting in a slightly different sound despite sharing the same pronunciation. The biggest obstacle for obtaining proper and natural sounding speech is incorrect intonation. Many students often speak without paying attention to the correct enunciation of pitches making speech sound unnatural (the classic foreigner's accent). It is not practical to memorize or attempt to logically create rules for pitches, especially since it can change depending on the context or the dialect. The only practical approach is to get the general sense of pitches by mimicking native Japanese speakers with careful listening and practice.