1.1 - Introduction To Japanese

Japanese, like English and German, is a language. Hence it cannot all be learned by an individual, simply due to the fact that a language is endless. However that shouldn't stop you from learning and eventually mastering Japanese. Not even native Japanese people know any more than 2000 kanji characters on average. No one is perfect so you can always catch up to people.

The Japanese language was derived from Ancient Chinese as Japan was once part of China. Then, it slowly began to change and over a couple centuries, morphed into the language we all know and love: Japanese. One can see that Japanese is based off Chinese due to the existence of "kanji". Kanji are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language but (mostly) have a different pronunciation and (sometimes different meaning) compared to their Chinese counterparts. For instance the kanji: 水 (mizu) means water in Japanese. It also means water in Chinese, although it's pronounced "shui" instead. Other kanji may or may not be in line with their Chinese counterparts in terms of meaning. 

That said, let's move on to the 3 different Japanese syllabaries (ways of writing) - Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana alphabets are merely over-simplified Chinese characters and have fixed sounds and hence, they're very easy to learn. The average learner can master Hiragana in under a week. Your mileage may vary but remember, it's really easy. Once you get past the Hiragana character-set, you can somewhat read Japanese and know all the possible sounds used in the language. Hiragana is used for writing Japanese words. Every Japanese word can be written in Hiragana. This is why one can get away without learning too much kanji. Not even the Japanese themselves know that much kanji.

Katakana has the same amount of alphabets and same pronunciation as Hiragana. The only difference is that the characters now look different and need to be learned alongside Hiragana. While Hiragana is used to denote native words, Katakana is used to write foreign words (like English words).

This might have become a really long read, but believe me, this stuff will really help you out.