The Moonrunes

Let’s start off with the moonrunes we all love and worship. What makes Japanese tricky to learn is the fact that they use 3 kinds of writings: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Here are the charts

Hiragana

Used to write most things and usually combined with Kanji character(s). Anyway, memorizing it is very important because in Japanese, Hiragana is love, Hiragana is life.

Katakana

Mainly used for foreign (or foreign sounded) words. By foreign, i mean foreign for the Japanese, like, English, French, Portuguese, etc, etc.

Kanji

Probably the hardest part in learning Japanese. These “things” came from China long time ago and now used by every normal Japanese. A total of 13000 characters can be encoded in various Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji. What a number! But relax, the most popular 2000-3000 characters will be enough to get you going! After you master a nice amount of Kanji, the I-Thought-It-Was-Chinese moonrunes like 魔法科高校の劣等生 will be decipherable , or at least, will start to make sense.

There’s no chart, go buy a book or something. But here are the basic of the basic to get you started

The ones written in Hiragana is the Kun-yomi (the reading native Japanese came up with) and the Katakana ones are On-yomi (the reading they get from the original Chinese reading). Most Kanji books and dictionaries are written in this format. So, remember it (please).