Why does the Japanese writing system have 3 forms (hiragana, katakana and kanji) rather than just 1?
407578
That's just their culture.\nHiragana is for native japanese words.\nkatakana is for foreign borrowed words\nand Kanji is for chinese borrowed words.
964986
in the 1st picture in the 2nd row 2nd before the last in japanese the kanji is "mi" you can add ru,mas(masu), or te its a verb for watch or look.
963634
http://www.freejapaneselessons.com\n\nteaches hiragana and katakana as well as some basic Kanji =)
373116
They have a keyboard with various "strokes."  Once entering the appropriate strokes for a symbol, it combines them into one.  I'm to understand it's a bit annoying to use.
1169670
Well, it ranges from 40,000 to 80,000 because it's really difficult to give an exact count as to the number of characters, since many of them are obscure, unused, or arcahic variants, even though they are all different.\n\nFor example, "two" is normally written as 二\nHowever, these two characters: 貳  弍 are ancient, though pretty much unused, ways to write it.\n\nCheck out the first source for more info.  I hope this helps  :)
50391
Turkish does not have 58 letters.\n\nJapanese has 3 different alphabets, 2 of them consisting of letters.\nHiragana, one of the Japanese alphabets has 46 letters. Katakana, another one of the Japanese alphabets also has 46 letters which give the same sounds as the hiragana letters but are written differently. Hiragana is used for Japanese words and Katakana is only used for foreign words. Lastly, Kanji is the alphabet that consists of over 50,000 characters, of which only 1000 are used 90% of the time.\n\nCharacters are not the same as letters, so Chinese would not count, which has more than 80,000, but not all of them are used.\n\nThe following languages have the number of letters that they have in them:\nEnglish - 26\nRussian - 33\nJapanese - 46\nKorean - 24\nHawaiian - 11\nAzeri - 32\nItalian - 21\nMalayalam - 56\n\nI used to think Khmer had the most letters, but that doesn't seem like it.
143594
You are asking about writing it in Japanese. That's impossible to answer because we cannot type in Japanese characters.
819753
Depends on what you want.  Do you want the Japanese alphabet- hiragana and katakana?  For there is no 'meaning' attached to any of those symbols- they truly act as an alphabet, like the English one, for example, only representing sounds.  Or the characters they use when really writing- kanji?  (Typical Japanese writing is a mixture of all three).\n\nFor hiragana, try this: http://genkienglish.net/genkijapan/hiragana1.htm\n\nFor katakana, try this:\n\nhttp://genkienglish.net/genkijapan/katakana1.htm\n\nFor kanji, there are so many (that any simple Google search will bring up, I might add), but here's a few:\n\nhttp://www.msu.edu/~lakejess/kanjigame.html\n\nhttp://www.japan-zone.com/games/concentration.shtml\n\nHope those help.
937685
JAPANESE.      \n\nThe textbook 'Japanese for busy people' is a good start.  Also people usually starting by learning Hiragana script, I found it more useful to start with katakana as it is used mainly for 'borrowed words'.  It makes reading a menu easy.
1101934
♡Well, I'm sitting with a group of 8 Japanese (as I pretty much do once a week) and I asked them your Q just now. This is what they said ～　It's a little difficult for us to pronounce "R" as well as "L", "V", "TH" and a few other letters or combinations of letters because they are those letters/sounds that aren't used in our everyday Japanese. SOME of us aren't accustomed to forming the letter(s) with our mouths or making the correct sound. We're just not used to it so when SOME of us speak English, which is foreign to us, we have some difficulty. It's not on purpose! It would be the same for some "foreigners" trying to speak Japanese and using "tsu", "gyo", "ryu" and such, they just don't get it. Think about it. We stress SOME because many Japanese people don't have the problem and pronounce "R" and all sounds perfectly. ～～So Coffee, there you have it, straight from the mouths of Japanese, who all speak English exceptionally well I might add!♡
921902
I'm watching this on my old mac so it may just be my problem, but what I see looks a lot like what Japanese text turns into when the computer uses wrong language set or there's compatibility problem with unicode fonts -- in other words, garbage.
663132
What you're likely getting there is an e-mail from somebody using an international character set that isn't installed on your system.  Chinese, for example, uses UNICODE characters and needs a chinese font.  \n\n(Gross simplification here: English and European languages have a pretty small set of characters, including upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc.  Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, etc. need many more symbols, which means a different way of organizing the characters).\n\nI'm going to assume you're using a browser-based e-mail system like Yahoo mail.  Follow the link in the "sources" box below.  It's some sort of Chinese lyrics web site I found for this answer.  Do you see the strange symbols you're talking about?  If so, that's likely what's happening.  \n\nYou can download a few common character sets, like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. and see if you can see the characters in your e-mail subject line.  Not that that'll help you understand them, of course.\n\nIf you're having this problem with a stand-alone e-mail client (ie, not your web browser) you may have an older e-mail program that doesn't support UNICODE.  You may want to look into upgrading.
42225
There are lots.  Try searching the web for "kanji tutorial," or check out one of the links below.
822265
English is a very difficult language to learn, and one of the many resons for this is that English has so many sounds which speakers of other languages don't generally learn to produce.  In Japanese, for example, there is no 'l' sound.  When an English word containing l is written in katakana, which is the alphabet in which most Japanese first encounter English words,  the character which SHOULD have an l sound is replaced with a character that actually has an r sound.  For this reason, gettings ls and rs confused is one of the most common mistakes Japanese make when speaking in English.  The other part is that English simply has more different types of sounds than Japanese does, and it's easy to get confused about pronunciation.\n\nThe simple answer: English has many sounds which can't be written in Japanese; and even when Japanese  people branch off from katakana and learn to use the Roman alphabet, there are still so many different sounds in English that some of them are easy to forget.\n\nOn an interesting footnote, it is also very difficult for Japanese people to end words with letters that aren't vowels.  The only consonant that can end a Japanese word is n, which is why many native Japanese speakes will accidentally throw a vowel sound at the end of a word which shouldn't actually have a vowel sound at the end.  They are simply not used to all of those extra consonants.
25888
Japanese, the main reason for this is that it is a fun langague to speak, but it also allows you to work internationally, and then help whatever company you are in reach globally.\n\nPersonally, most companies where i'm from look heavily on people who know more than one language, and will often put them in higher positions to be able to use such abilities.
61308
Its arrange in the way that, most commonly used letters are clustered in the centre so that we could type fast and efficiently.. though scientist have proved that this is not as fast as it could have been. \n\nU can find more info onarrangements of letter in this site..
365276
There are two main ways of writing japanese, hiragana and katakana not including the hiroglyphics/picture words. It is a pretty complex language unless you only wish to speak it but I would advise you order a book and CD or take a course somewhere.