Japanese Character

In Japanese language, there are three kinds of characters.
They are called as Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.

All of them are originated from Chinise character.

Hiragana and Katakana is close to Alphabet in English, because they are sound-express character.

Kanji is ideographic character and there are more than 10,000 characters,

and I (and probably most of japanese) can't know all of them.

It is one (and main) reason why japanese language is hard to learn.

So I respect foreigner who can speak and write Japanese very well!