How is Japanese written?

Japanese, as many other languages, is not written with the Latin alphabet like English.  

  Japanese is written with a mixture of 4 types of writing; hiragana, katakana, kanji and the Latin alphabet from time to time.  

  To write like this might seem really difficult, and it is, but not because of the mixture, but because of the kanji. Let’s take a look at hiragana and katakana.  

  Hiragana and katakana are both known as kana. They are not exactly an alphabet, but a syllabary, that is a collection of syllables (usually a consonant and a vowel) which are the sounds that Japanese uses.   

  Hiragana uses the following characters  
 

While katakana uses these  

 Kanji is not that simple, and yes even though hiragana and katakana seem difficult to learn it’s just a matter of practice and repetition that will get you to master both syllabaries.  

  Kanji is a set of Chinese characters that are based on ideas, they can be seen as pictures of objects that were modified to resemble more to a form of writing and not a draw.  

  So, as kanji represent ideas it’s obvious that there most be a lot of them, and the truth is that you have to learn around 2000 kanjis to understand written texts in Japanese as the newspaper or a book.  

  Finally, Latin alphabet is used for names of foreign brands, from some popular English words in Japan, etc. so it is common to see it, but don’t you expect a full sentence to be written this way.