text: The Chinese characters work very well for Chinese because Chinese has no suffixes on its words.  But when Chinese writing was borrowed into Japanese it didn't work so well because Japanese sentences REQUIRE the Japanese suffixes.  You can't write suffixes with Chinese characters, which the Japanese called Kanji.\n\nSo the Japanese invented a set of symbols, a syllabary, to represent the Japanese suffixes to follow the Kanji characters.  Actually, two different sets developed, the hiragana, which is more ornate and is often called the "woman's hand", and the katagana, which is simpler in form.\n\nIn modern Japanese, the word stem is written in Kanji, and the suffixes are written in either hiragana (in literature oriented towards women) or katagana (in business writing and literature oriented towards men and children).  Foreign words are written phonetically in katagana.  Sometimes you even see the Roman alphabet for words that are recognizable.