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As you may or may not know, the Japanese writing system is comprised of three writing systems used with each other, Hiragana (used for Japanese words), Katakana (used for foreign words) and Kanji (used for Japanese words as well). Hiragana and Katakana are both 46 character phonetic writing systems. If your not clear on how to pronounce things phonetically, then go to the pronounciation guide page and then come back here.
Kanji_______________________________
The kanji is comprised of thousands of different symbols which stand for whole words. Kanji are taken directly from the Chinese and so the kanji in china and the kanji in Japan are the same but are pronounced differently. No Japanese person or any other person fro that matter knows every kanji and I believe that the average Japanese person knows less then a thousand kanji, probably around 800 for a well educated Japanese person.
When reading kanji, each kanji has two ways of reading it. An on reading and a kun reading. On reading's are used when the kanji is being combined with another kanji and the kun reading is used when it's by itself. An example would be the kanji for fire. When it's used by itself it's pronounced hi, but when it's combined with another kanji say with the kanji for mountain it's read as kazan, where ka is fire and zan is mountain coming to mean volcano. Kanji usually have a couple of different on reading's and also, there are a lot of exceptions where a kanji's kun reading will be used when it's combined with something making it really tough on a foreigner whose trying to learn kanji.
Hiragana and Katakana__________________
When talking about Hiragana and Katakana the word that is commonly used is kana. Also, above kanji (especially in books for younger children) you may see kana above the kanji which tells you what it is. When kana is used like this it's called furigana. Needless to say, kana is considerably easier to learn then kanji, mostly becasue it is a bit more logical and also there simply isn't a lot of characters compared to kanji.
The table below shows the basic hiragana. You many notice that there are two characters for o one is used for spelling words and the other is used as a particle. I'll talk about particle's when I make another page about Japanese Language which should be soon.
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In order to make other sounds like ga, za, da, pa, etc... you add " to certain hiragana (this is called Dakoun) and if you want to make a p sound then you add a circle to the ha's (this is called Handakuon)
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For making additional sounds you combined certain kana which is called Youon
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As I said before the Katakana is used for foreign words that have made their way into Japanese like Gorira (Gorrilla) There are a few characters here that are similar to hiragana and one which is exactly the same Here's the basic Katakana
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The Dakuon and Handakuon is formed the same way as in hiragana
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Now because Katakana is used for foreign words it has another set of combinations of itself which are used to make sounds which really aren't part of the Japanese language. An example of where these would be used is for the word Violin which would be spelled wiorin
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Stroke Order__________________________
Stroke order is important for both the kana and kanji. As a general rule strokes are made from top to bottom and left to right. Although it would be easier with a picture I'll do my best to describe the stroke order of let's say the katakana ro which basically looks like a square. You would define a stroke as when you put your pencil on the paper, draw the line(s) and then take it off. So there are three strokes in making katakana's ro. The first is from top to bottom for the left most line. Then you would take the pencil off the paper, go to the top of the line and make another line from left to right and then without taking your pencil off the paper, make a stroke from u p to down. Take your pencil off the paper again and finish off the bottom of the square by joining the two ends from left to right. I know it would be so much easier with pictures so in the future I'll be putting some up.
I hope this helped you a little in learning about the Japanese writing system and just in case you want to learn how to write these characters, there are a lot of books out there which can help you most of which are probably at a big bookstore like Barnes and Noble although they are usually pretty expensive. In my opinion the best book for learning Hiragana and Katakana is Let's Learn Hiragana by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura and Let's Learn Katakana by the same author. I have yet to find a really good book for learning kanji, but as soon as I find one I'll post the name and author here.