OK
First lesson revision: Japanese syllabaries:
1- Romaji- forget it- will only hinder learning to speak, write Japanese- avoid at all costs
2- Hiragana- curved, flowing- the primary phonetic 'alphabet' that is the primary buiding block of the language- used for difficult kanji (with lots of strokes), words with no kanji, particles like and, am, are, suffixes like- san and verb & adjective inflections.
3- Katakana- angular, sharp- used for foreign words, scientific words, onomatopoeia (love writing that word), emphasis (like italics in English) & food
4- Kanji- daunting prospect considering the need to learn about 2000 of them for 'everyday' use- consists of nouns, adjectives & verbs.
This is like a pilgrimage- the course path leads to the desired goal one step at a time.
Let the journey commence....