Starting off with Katakana and Hiragana

When picking up Japanese as a second (or third language), it is always recommended that one should start off by learning all of the characters of Katakana and Hiragana which you will find below.

Before you begin, you should thoroughly understand the difference between Katakana and Hiragana.

To put it simply;

Katakana

• Used for foreign words and names such as "television" or "terebi"(テレビ)
• Are normally more angular and has more straight lines than hiragana

Hiragana

• Used for words of Japanese origin such as "watashi"(私) which stands for "Me" or "I"
• Sometimes used to simplify kanji

Special Case: Romaji

• During your studies, you are bound to come across this form of writing. 
• Romaji is using Roman alphabets (A - Z) to transliterate Japanese. 
• For example : Nice to meet you, I am Ryan / Hajimemashite, Ryan desu. 
• Literally: writing out japanese text using Roman alphabets.

Below are two charts; one for Katakana and the other for Hiragana. If you aren't interested to learn writing or reading Japanese, then you will want to focus on the pronunciation of these words to ensure that you are able to understand or be understood by others when you do speak the language at some point. 

A case in point, the Japanese have characters for "Ra" in both Katakana and Hiragana as you can see from the charts below. However, the Japanese do not pronounce them as "ra" but instead as "la".

The basic list of both katakana and hiragana are listed above. However, there exists alternate versions of the characters above which is displayed below. If you have been listening to Japanese conversation, watching anime, or listening to Japanese music, then you may have picked up on them (but did not recognize them).

At first glance, you may feel that there are just too many characters to learn. If this is where you start doubting yourself, then you won't get anywhere with this language. You don't have to learn all of the characters in one go, instead you can decide how many characters you'd like to learn in a day. Start off with 10, then slowly increase that as you get more comfortable.