Japanese is formed of 3 different alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Kanji is the oldest of the three. It is a picture-based system from Chinese which are characters that represent whole words. This means if you indeed know some Mandarin, you will recognise some Kanji. Although the meanings are the same, the pronunciation is not. Hiragana came about because, long story short, Kanji proved difficult to learn. Hiragana brings forward individual sounds, meaning if you know the alphabet, you can read extracts of text. With Kanji you need to memorise the character from scratch. Katakana likewise is a native alphabet based on sounds, but this focuses more on foreign and new words. Two examples are Katakana are: アメリカ means America and is pronounced amerika クリスマス means Christmas and is pronounced kurisumasu This is a deep topic which requires much more research and reading but that's the jist of it without trying to add too much confusion at these stages!