Hiragana & Katakana

Here's a bit of the basics... For the uninitiated, the Japanese language is essentially broken into a few components:

i) Hiragana (the main language)
ii) Katakana (characters for English sounding words)
iii) Kanji (similar to our Chinese characters)
iv) Romanji (no-brainer way of reading Japanese using English characters. I use that mostly...)

There are 5 vowels in the Japanese language, much like in English (e.g. a,e,i,o,u) and 9 consonants (e.g. k,s,t,n,h,m,y,r,w). You do a mix and match and viola! You get Japanese!

Of course, this is just an ultra-simplified explanation of the language, but this will do for now. There are approximately 45 characters each for Hiragana and Katagana, so once you've gotten a good grasp of those, you should be able to read reasonably well. Here's a simple Hiragana chart: