Japanese

That's probably from its history. I'm not too sure if hiragana and katakana came from Korea, or if it was native to Japan, but kanji came from China and was incorporated into the language. Even back then, kanji was difficult to learn, since kanji literally means "Chinese characters", and there are over 2000 of them. Imagine having one symbol representing a word, instead of a combination of letters representing a word. Chinese is based on ideograms. Hiragana can be used for pronounciation of words, but the same words can be written in kanji. But if you don't know any kanji, then good luck trying to read the road signs in Japan. Katakana and hiragana consists of a consonant and a vowel, but they don't use all the letters (notable exceptions include "v", "w", except "wa" and "l"). There are about 50 of those. Katakana is used for foreign words, like your names, if they aren't natively Japanese, or other imported words. Even titles are sometimes written in Katakana. But normally, all words, including verbs, adverbs, adjectives and nouns are written in kanji, and hiragana is used for the inflection and conjugation of verbs and such, and also as particles, which identify a word's part of speech.

I have studied Japanese 3 years ago and sucessfully pass leve 1 japanese examination, so I think I can give you a few tips of learning Japanese. Japanese language is easy if you are chinese/taiwanese/korean. since I do not where to see your profile, I will just asume you are an american. First, hiragana and katakana are not from korea. Japanese get the idea from simplied chinese language, then change them to different shapes. To learn japanese, you must learn both hiragana and katakana at the same time, but dont rush because it must take some time before you remember all the funny square looking words. Both hiragana and katakana share the same prouncitaion, just in different shapes. If you can remember all those 50~ ways of reading it, you can read everything in japanese already!!! Do not worry about studying kanji till you finish those.

hope it helps. good luck!