Why Japanese uses three scripts at once, what each one is for, and the order most learners tackle them in.
Open any Japanese book or menu and you will usually see three different writing systems side by side. That can look intimidating, but each script has a clear job, and once you know what each one is for, Japanese text starts to make sense quickly.
The three scripts are hiragana, katakana and kanji. A fourth, romaji, is simply Japanese written in the Latin alphabet. It is used for learners, signs and keyboards rather than everyday reading.
Hiragana is a syllabary: each character stands for a whole syllable such as ka, shi or tsu, rather than a single letter. The basic set has 46 characters, and their shapes are rounded and flowing.
Hiragana is used for grammatical endings, small function words and particles, and for native words that have no common kanji. In 食べる (taberu, "to eat"), the first character is kanji and the rest, べる, is hiragana showing the verb ending. Words such as ありがとう (arigatō, "thank you") are normally written entirely in hiragana.
Because it is used everywhere and is relatively small, hiragana is almost always the first script learners master.
Katakana covers the same set of sounds as hiragana, but with sharper, more angular shapes. Its main job is writing words borrowed from other languages, as well as foreign names, sound effects and words a writer wants to emphasise, a bit like italics in English.
Many katakana words come from English, so they can feel like a reward once you can read them: ゼロ (zero, "zero") and コーヒー (kōhī, "coffee") are both in Flashlingo's beginner deck. The long dash ー in コーヒー lengthens the vowel before it, which is how Japanese represents long sounds in katakana.
Be aware that loanwords are adapted to Japanese pronunciation, so they don't always sound like the original. Reading them aloud slowly is often the quickest way to recognise them.
Kanji are characters that came to Japan from Chinese. Unlike hiragana and katakana, each kanji carries meaning as well as sound: 水 means "water" (read mizu on its own) and 山 means "mountain" (read yama).
Two things make kanji the long-term challenge of Japanese. First, there are many of them: the official list of kanji for general use, the jōyō kanji, contains 2,136 characters. Second, most kanji have more than one reading, depending on whether they appear alone or inside a compound word.
The upside is that kanji make reading faster once you know them. Japanese is written without spaces between words, and kanji help the eye see where words begin and end. They also let you guess the meaning of new compound words from parts you already know.
Flashlingo shows romaji next to every Japanese word so beginners can say words before they can read every script. We use a Hepburn-style spelling, where long vowels are marked with a line, as in kōhī and arigatō.
Romaji is a stepping stone, not a destination. If you rely on it for too long, it becomes harder to switch to real Japanese text. A good rule is to use romaji to learn pronunciation, then glance at the Japanese spelling every time you answer, so the real script gradually becomes familiar.
Throughout all of this, keep building vocabulary. Script and vocabulary support each other: every word you know gives you something to read. The Japanese quiz shows each word in Japanese script with romaji and English, and the full word list is on the page if you'd like to read through it first.