hiragana

Learn hiragana and katakana while working through these - after the first few chapters, the roumaji goes away.

A single character of either hiragana or katakana represents only a single syllable of sound (such as か（ka),ぽ(po),し(shi),etc.).

The Japanese retro-future consists of white people of European descent, immersed in a world full of katakana/hiragana/kanji signeage.

Yes, it's surprising how many things you can figure out just by being able to read hiragana and katakana.

Most Japanese names are written in Kanji, but often accompanied by Hiragana to help the reader pronounce them properly.

Most of the katakana (which these are), along with the hiragana, have a standard romanization.

I understand what you mean; I've been studying Japanese for five years now and learned hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks of class.

Having finally learnt Hiragana and learnign some basic sentence structure i feel like my next step should be to write and read basic sentences in hiragana only and then move to learn some basic Kanji.

It would also really shine for languages with different alphabets - eg for japanese the top line could use kanji/hiragana/katakana, and the middle line romaji.

With computers even Japanese people don't need to know how to write kanji, they just type the hiragana and hit space til they see it.

I've just recently learned Hiragana on my own (using two Android Apps and pen&paper writing) and learning by reading a german japanese learning book.

(This isn't the only way to convey that a long vowel in hiragana isn't semantic, though.

My level would be "lower intermediate": I can write hiragana/katakana and know about 100+ kanjis.

I see hanzi/kanji, katakana, and zhuyin (but not hiragana) as all part of the same "alphabet" used to build up hanzi recursively.

Katakata, like zhuyin, is "hanzi/kanji written small", just as hiragana is "hanzi written quickly".

Unless you were trying to learn Japanese though, that's as far as you got -- you couldn't have the seamless "mata a 12 [green dragons]" unless you knew your hiragana/katakana.

Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, and other assorted symbols) also has its own block outside of the Unified Han block.

Yeah, Kanji might be a tall order right now (still working with Hiragana/Katakana first), but found the forums.

Hiragana and katakana are the first things you go over and it took a good part of the first year.