Japan and their alphabets?

Question:

My dream is to move to Japan and I heard how Japan has many alphabets including just spelling out the word in Latin letters. So I was wondering which one is most commonly used like on the internet and which ones should I learn because I don't want to be writing to my friends in like some ancient form of Japanese I wanna know which should I learn or should I just spell them out in the English/Latin Alphabet?

Answer:

In Japanese there are 3 alphabets.

1) Kanji: These are Chinese characters that are used in Japanese. Kanjis are used commonly. There are approximately 2000 kanji characters widely used in Japanese.

For example:

Rain = 雨 (ame)

2) Hiragana: These are characters created by the Japanese. Hiragana is generally used for affixes or other grammatical expressions.

こんにちは (konnichiwa)

3) Katakana: These are used to write foreign words such as "Hamburger" or "McDonalds" :)

ハンバーガー (hanbaagaa: hamburger)
マクドナルド (Makudonarudo: McDonalds)

People who start to learn Japanese use hiragana and katakana more as it is hard for them to memorize "kanji" characters. (because there are over 2000 kanji characters that are used in Japanese and they look complicated at first)

To be able to speak Japanese naturally, you should learn all three alphabets. But if you just memorize hiragana and katakana alphabets and use them while writing your Japanese friends, that's ok too. But native Japanese people do use kanji. Only primary school Japanese students and foreigners who know elementary level Japanese use hiragana.

Hope it helps.