Konnichiwa! I had some free time, so I figured I'd teach y'all what I know about Japanese.

First of all, Japanese is not my first language, nor have I had any "proper" form of education in it. Everything I know I learned from Video Games (mainly Pokémon), Anime, and Manga.

Anyway, first I'll tell you about the four types of characters (letters) used in Japanese.
There's Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji (the hardest to learn), and Romaji (what I've been using here).

Hiragana are the main kind of characters used in Japanese. They are used for spelling regular words, like "Konnichiwa", "Sayonara", and "Arigato".

Katakana are very similar to Hiragana, they're just used for different things. For example, the Japanese names of every Pokémon character (Human or Pokémon) are spelled with Katakana, while things like items and moves (and most of the dialogue) are usually spelled with Hiragana.
Katakana is also used when spelling foreign words (such as English words) in Japanese.

Kanji characters are similar to Chinese (in fact, most of them ARE Chinese), in that a single character/letter can be a whole word. Obviously, that makes learning them very difficult, as there are at least hundreds of them (probably thousands).

Romaji is when you spell a Japanese word or name with "Roman" letters (the same letters used in English, and many other European languages). Whenever I spell out a Japanese word with regular English letters, that's Romaji.

Anyway, the next lesson will be sort of odd. I'll teach you how to enter Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji characters into an Internet search. Sayonara!