text: why do the japanese have three sets of alaphabets instead of one ? don't the kids of japan find it confusing to learn those 200+ letters ? 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.  so 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.  in 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.