What is Kana?

If you are just beginning your journey into the learning of the Japanese language you probably know very little of its writing system as it seems very difficult to learn.  Some of you might know Romanji which is the pronunciation of words or characters but knowing Romanji alone will not prepare you for reading Kana.
What exactly is Kana?  Well, Kana is the way to write in Japanese.  In English you use the alphabet but in Japanese you use syllabics called Kana.  The Japanese language does not write with an alphabet instead they write with characters that represent the word syllable by syllable.  Kana is a combination between Hiragana, which is the way most words are written, Katakana, which is used to write words derived from other languages and Kanji, which is Chinese's characters used to represent words. 

For example let's write:   'Good morning'  In romanji that would be 'Ohayō' in Japanese it would be written in Hiragana as おはよう .  Notice that there are four separate character, one for each syllable in the word 'O-ha-yo-o'  

One of the easiest ways to learn Kana is by starting with Hiragana since it is used more often and can sometimes replace or be written above Kanji so all can read.  Kanji is the hardest to learn out of all the Japanese Kana because only one character represents a whole word and even the average Japaneses person sometime gets them confused so don't be too discouraged if you don't get it right away.

That's all for today!
またね！Matane!　See you soon!
Hiragana-Romanji-English