There are three types of scripts in japanese: hiragana, katakana and kanji (chinese characters).
hiragana and katakana are phonetic symbols purely representing sounds, while Kanji are idiographs,conveying meanings as well as sounds .
Japanese is usually written with a combination of hiragana, katakana and Kanji with katakana used to write foreign names and loanwords and hiragana used to write particles and the grammatical endings of verbs and adjectives. Romaji (the letters of the Roman alphabet) are also occasionally used to write Japanese (the names of train stations are one example) for the convenience of foreigners.
