Start of a new adventure

Learning a new language and culture is always intimidating and yet curiously fun at the same time.  I am currently trying to learn Japanese and having to learn hiragana, katakana, and kanji is a hassle sometimes.  Hiragana is a type of alphabet with 48 characters and is a flowing style of writing.  Hiragana is mainly used for words that are native to the Japanese language.  Katakana is another alphabet with 48 characters just like hiragana but has a much sharper edge to it.  Katakana is mainly used for words that are from the outside countries.  Kanji is probably the hardest to learn because it has characters that are symbols that mean a specific thing.  To properly read higher level things in japan you have to at least remember 2000 kanji characters.  Hiragana and Katakana even though there are 48 characters this isn’t counting the combined form of ya, yu, and yo also the dakuten and the handakuten markers for some of the characters.  The dakuten marks are the characters with quotation markers on them that change ka to ga and so on.  The handakuten markers are the characters with circle dots on them that change ha to pa and so on.  Learning to correctly use all of these together and trying to make sense of them does take a lot of studying and practice, but you will get better at it.  I have memorized both the katana and hiragana characters and started to memorize some of the kanji characters.