The Japanese language has 3 alphabets (symbols): Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. The combination of Hiragana and Katakana is called Kana. Each alphabet is used for different purposes.

Katakana symbols are mainly used for foreign words that are borrowed from other languages, whereas Hiragana symbols are mainly preferred for grammatical purposes. Out of all of them, Kanji is the main alphabet that’s based on Chinese characters, whose symbols can be used alone or merged with other Kanji or Kana symbols to form more words.
In Japanese, there’s no space between the words and it makes it hard to know where a word ends and another begins. Just like Chinese, Japanese can also be written vertically and horizontally.
While Katakana is more squarish (boxier), Hiragana is much curvier and rounder. ’’Hello’’ in Japanese is written like こんにちは.
To memorize the words, you can use the image-based mnemonic method where each word is remembered through objects. For example, imagine your eyes are looking through 目 to remember that it means ’’eye.’’ 火 looks like ’’fire.’’ Or consider watching the rain from 雨, which means ’’rain.’’

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