Before you start delving into the strange, squiggly world of kanji (those symbols that leave English-speakers scratching their heads and wondering why Japan's writing system is so complicated) take a look at the two basic, phonetic syllabaries that act as building blocks to word formation: hiragana and katakana.
Together they're the foundation of Japanese. Without them, stringing sentences together would make as much sense as saying "kitty bishop slipper teacup around macaroni."
Learning these two syllabaries is fairly easy. There's only 46 characters, and the sounds are identical in both alphabets. Hiragana is used to spell words that are uniquely Japanese, like でんしゃ (densha/train) and is the first alphabet taught to children in Japan. Katakana is used for "loan words" that came from outside Japan, like コンピュタア (konpyutaa/computer).
The sound of a character can change if you put a special mark or another character after it. Example: the character き sounds like "ki" or "key", but adding two downward strokes at the end gives you ぎ, or "gi". Add the character ゆ (yu) to き and as you would expect, you get きゅ or "kyu".
It sounds complicated, but it really isn't. If you take a little time each day to study maybe five characters, you can learn both alphabets within a month or so. Here's a link to a YouTube video that gives the pronunciation of the basic syllabaries, with hiragana at the top, katakana in the middle, and the English pronunciation at the bottom:
Here's a link that explains the stroke order and pronunciation of hiragana, and here's one for katakana.
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