Japanese writing consists of three main scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana is a phonetic script used for native Japanese words and grammatical elements, while katakana is used primarily for foreign words and names. Kanji are characters borrowed from Chinese, representing whole words or concepts. Each script serves a unique purpose in the language. Hiragana and katakana each have 46 basic characters, while kanji includes thousands of characters, with about 2,000 commonly used in everyday writing. Together, these scripts create a rich and complex writing system that reflects Japan's linguistic history.