A few years ago I was trying to teach myself the Japanese language.
What you see below is my own writing from that time, when I was practicing the
Hiragana syllabary. Japanese writing consists of 3 forms of writing: Kanji, Hiragana,
and Katakana. Kanji is pictographic--in other words, each character generally
represents one word or concept, more or less. It is derived from Chinese
pictographs. Hiragana and Katakana are syllabaries. That is, each character refers to a sound,
not a word; words are constructed from these "building blocks". They are not what we
would call alphabets, because an alphabet contains characters which refer to single
consonants or vowels, whereas in Hiragana and Katakana, there is no such thing--the basic
unit is a syllable (although a vowel by itself is considered one syllable).

Furthermore, Hiragana is used for "true Japanese" words, whereas Katakana
is used for words of foreign origin, including non-Japanese names. For example
my name, Daniel, would be written in Katakana script, with an approximated
pronunciation of something like "Danieru". "Golf" becomes, more or less,
"gorofu".

Below is my poor attempt to write the Hiragana syllabary, with corresponding
Romanized approximate pronunciations:

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