Japanese is quite different from English and so are the ways we learn to read/write.

Japanese has 3 different sets of characters: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are set of 48 phonetic characters (CV). They both are exact variations of each other, but katakana is only used for foreign languages and names. They look different too – hiragana is a much smoother script whereas katakana is a much rigid, angular script. For example, the sound “ka” is written “か” in hiragana and “カ” in katakana.
Third set is kanji, which is the most complicated style of writing in Japanese. They are thousands of Chinese characters, each with multiple ways of reading and meaning. Kanjis are tricky because the way it can be read alters depending on how it is used in writing. For example, ‘a person’ can be written as “人” in kanji. This character represents the word “person” and is read as ‘hito’. Now if we were to say three people, we would write “three (三) person (人)” in Kanji, which looks like this: “三人” This is read as ‘san-nin.’ As you can see, “人” is now read ‘nin’ rather than ‘hito’ because it is combined with another kanji. There are other ways “人” can be read: hito, nin, bito, jin, ri, etc. Because we have so many kanjis in our language, we do not learn every existing kanjis during our schooling. Trying to remember everything is almost an impossible task.

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Japanese sentences are mixture of all these three sets of characters. Here are some examples:

My name is Yuka Zaiki. My pet dog’s name is Cocoa.
私の名前は財木裕香です。私のペットの犬の名前はココアです。

**Underlined are kanjis and bolded/italicized are the katakanas. Rest are hiraganas.

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In Japan, children start learning hiragana first. By the end of kindergarden, most students are able to read and write hiragana and maybe even katakana. We write over and over to practice remembering these characters. By the end of Gr.1 first term, all students are able to read hiragana and katakana; kanji learning starts in term 2. In order to remember kanji, we write over and over again, and take multiple kanji tests. That is exactly how I learned to read and write Japanese too. It is purely memorization. Overtime it becomes easier and easier and you will start to remember more complex kanjis too.

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If you are interested, here is a chart of hiragana, katakana, and some kanji.

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