Japanese Scripts.

 

1.         Kanji -- a non-phonetic script.
Since 1981, official kanji for general use has consisted of 1,945 regular characters, plus 166 special characters used only for people's names. These kanji are taught, grade-by-grade, in the Japanese school system. Kanji characters are not phonetic; that is, each kanji character represents a concept, rather than a sound. There are also 1,000 or so unofficial characters.

 

2.          Phonetic scripts.
In each of these two scripts, each character represents a sound, just as with Roman characters.

a.      Hiragana.
Hiragana's 48 characters are used for writing native Japanese words that are not easily written using kanji.

b.      Katakana..
Katakana's 48 characters are typically used for writing words borrowed from other languages, such as from English, German or French.