Written Japanese uses three separate alphabets (four if you count "romaji", our standard 26-letter English alphabet). Hey, come back! It's not that bad; don't worry.

Two of the three are syllabic. They are called hiragana and katakana, and consist of fairly simple characters used to represent syllables. Hiragana and katakana are known collectively as "kana".

Kanji, however, are more complicated / difficult / beautiful / fascinating. Read a bit further and choose your own adjective...