Here is my ADHD explanation:
This is an assumption, but you can probably read English without much trouble. If not, you may want to review that before studying Japanese through English. English is a weird mix between a bunch of languages. When there happened to be a word that wasn't in English, we would just grab it from another language. It works for words like "zebra" but with many words we get this gobbily-gook like "bologna". Try reading that word phonetically. We have rules, which we call "spelling". This would be great if it worked but because English is a platter of languages, the rules can't really apply everywhere -- which eliminates the reason for them.
This looks like a political cartoon gone wrong.
So Japanese can't be much different, right? Wrong! Unlike English which gobbled up words and other languages, Japanese was like the anti-social cousin staying untouched for many many years. At that time Japanese people didn't have a writing system -- which kinda sucked. So essentially they went to China and stole their writing system. At first, Japanese people had to learn Chinese if they wanted to write down anything. Imagine learning another language to write in your own! Sounds like anything but fun doesn't it? So the Japanese had to somehow connect the two languages. How the old Japanese works isn't really important to us as many Japanese people today can't even figure it out. (Look up "Old English" and you might understand better.)
You thought algebra was bad enough!
So Japanese made no sense for a while. Then two revolutions took place. The first one was made by monks who decided to take apart the Chinese characters and use those parts phonically. They called it "Katakana" which can roughly translate to "part-of-characters" as they came from the Chinese characters. The Japanese government loved Katakana and wrote everything in it.
So while the government and the male population of Japan wrote in Katakana and Chinese characters, women were still illiterate. This wasn't because women are dumb (I'm kidding) but because they were forbidden to learn to read. I guess they thought they could manipulate them better. Good for them. Anyways, the women were pretty upset, as usual, and decided to make their own writing system. Instead of taking apart Chinese characters, they just created a "shorthand" version of the characters. The women used these characters to communicate to each other. They called their writing system "Hiragana". Which means "Peaceful Characters". I don't really see a connection either.
I don't even have to set up this joke.
Despite their differences, both sets of characters were pretty similar and eventually they both became official. Women are still stupid though.
Another way of looking at these sets of characters is like our own alphabet. We have little letters for pretty much everything and big letters used for names and stuff. Now, imagine a bunch more uses for the capital letters and you got the Japanese system. So instead of using Katakana for capitalization like English, it is used for foreign words, animal names, phonetics and abbreviations. Hiragana is used for grammar words like our version of "an" and "the". Words that Japanese people didn't know how to write using Chinese characters were also written in Hiragana. We will be learning how to read and write these Hiragana and Katakana characters in the next 28 days.
So from here on out each lesson will contain a download for both the PDF and the MP3 files. A youtube video here and there will demonstrate how to write your first characters.
がんばって！Good luck!
(PS: For you know-it-alls, I know Japanese technically doesn't have alphabets. They are called, "syllabaries". No-one cares that you know that. )
