Japanese is the ninth most spoken language in the world with 125 millions of speakers. It is spoken in just one country, Japan. The anterior eight positions are spoken in an amount that goes from two to five countries. The Japanese language consists of three main writings which are Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. There is a fourth writing but is almost unused. Even though the writings are different, they are read with the same pronunciation.
The first writing is Hiragana and it is the basis of the Japanese language. It consists of forty seven syllables which are simple to write. The pronunciation is as in Spanish. For example, the "a" is pronounced as in "father", the "i" is pronounced as in "feet", the "u" as in "mood", the "e" as in "met", and the "o" as in "fort". Hiragana is widely used and its only use is to write the native Japanese language words. It belongs to a branch named Kana. Kana consists of Hiragana and Katakana.
Katakana is the second writing of the branch Kana. As Hiragana, it is widely used but although it exists in the same branch, it is used differently. Its main use is to write foreign words, such as names, in Japanese syllables, but it's also used to emphasize small writings up to one paragraph long. As in the Japanese language there does not exist the letters "c", "l", "q", "v", "x", "ye", or "yi", in Katakana there is from "va - vo". None of the words in Katakana can be written in Kanji.
The most difficult, larger and complex writing is Kanji. Kanji are Chinese characters which are written exactly the same as in Chinese but pronounced and read differently. The pronunciation is the same as in Hiragana or in Katakana but there are not just forty seven characters, there are like 4500 that everyone needs to know in order to read a common newspaper. In total there are more than 45000 Kanji. Another difference between Kanji used in Japanese language and Kanji used in Chinese language is the amount of them.