Japanese writing incorporates both Chinese characters and symbols that have a sound value like an alphabet (called a syllabary). Because of their syllabary, the Japanese are able to learn much more ...

In addition to two alphabets — strictly speaking, syllabaries — comprised of 46 characters each to write the modern language's sounds phonetically, written Japanese also uses imported Chinese ...

Unlike modern Chinese, which uses around 6000 characters, for Japanese you only need about 2000. Japanese sentences combine kanji characters with hiragana and katakana .