Understanding the symbols of the japanese language.
 

one main question i always wanted to know was how do i spell with the japanese letters or "symbols". I have seen the letters for Japanese and all, it's just that when i see 3 different symbols used to spelled the word "CAT" and when i see the japanese version of it, it's one whole symbol. How is that? my 1st idea is that they fuse all the symbols from "c" "a" "t" and form "CAT" but if it's not that way....then how?:confused:

This questions been answered dozens of times, but assuming you can't find the answer using the forum search:

Japanese has three types of 'symbols'.

The word for 'Cat' in Japanese is 'neko'. In romaji (abc letters) that's 4 letters but Japanese doesn't use ~letters~, it uses sound characters. So in 'hiragana' Japanese, it's written with two, the one for the sound 'ne' and the one for the sound 'ko' -> ねこ There are 45 basic characters in the hiragana plus a helping of special ones, so if you know them all and you hear a word you can mostly 'spell' it out from the sounds. So if I heard someone say "shungiku", i could spell that out easily because I know the characters for 'shu', 'n', 'gi' and 'ku'.

Japanese also uses 'katakana'. It works in the exact same way as hiragana, but looks a little different. It's mostly used for words adopted from other languages (like non-japanese names, 'television', 'ballet' etc) and animal/plant names. 'neko' in katakana is written as ネコ。

The third 'symbol' system is called 'kanji'. These don't represent a sound like hiragana or katakana, they represent a whole word and/or a meaning. So 'neko' in kanji is 猫, just one character. So you can't simply 'spell' a word using kanji. It doesn't work in the same way at all; you either know the kanji, or you don't. It's as simple as that.

Just read this: Japanese writing system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's better than anyone here is willing to explain it.