I very briefly talked about the writing system in Japanese back in Phase #1. In Phase #2, we will attempt to understand each of these writing systems so that they don't get in the way of our future studying. Specifically, we need to learn:

1. Hiragana (phonetic characters used for Japanese words)
   ひらがな ← They have a more cursive style.
2. Katakana (phonetic characters used primarily for foreign loan words)
   カタカナ ← They have a more angular style.
3. Kanji (characters that express meaning, adapted from Chinese)
   漢字 ← They have a more complex & ridiculous style.

Before I get into the practicalities of mastering these, there is something I'd like to bring up.

Namely, I want to look at…