The Japanese language is not an easy one for the western reader. He has to conquer four different writing systems and learn the pronunciation of each sign in those systems on top of that.

The Japanese language contains Kanji (漢字) which are signs originating from the chinese writing which mostly represents the base word. In addition two syllable based systems Hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名) - mostly used to indicate grammatical forms - and Katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名), which is mainly used for foreign words and the latin alphabet which is called romaji (ローマ字). All those systems have different purposes and are used in parallel in day to day writing.