I’ve been studying Korean, or the letters are all incredibly easy to memorize because the similar sounds have similar characters.
For example – ㄱ is a lighter sound and ㅋ is “sharper”. Same with ㄷ vs ㅌ. ㅏ and ㅑ, etc.
Is Japanese similar or do all characters just have different sound with no reason to why the character is made that way?
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Hangul was specifically designed to be easy to learn. Japanese phonetic alphabets are based off chinese characters which were definitely not designed to be easy
Hiragana and katakana aren’t *too* difficult. Kanji is just a hot mess. Some of them are vaguely pictographic if you’ve had enough booze, but most are just nonsense you have to memorize.
Sometimes the symbol is for the same concept as Chinese, but uses the pronunciation that Japanese used before they had a writing system. (Example: 学 references school/learning in both languages. Also, that’s the most Chinese I know.)
Sometimes the simplified Chinese character is used because it sounds similar in Chinese to the Japanese sound used. However as this writing system developed over a few centuries, that Chinese sound may have changed and be used differently elsewhere in Japanese for the same reason. (Example: 人 can be pronounced jin, nin, or hito. I have no idea which pronunciation is Chinese.)
Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic. One symbol makes one sound. (あ and ア= A) Hiragana is used for some words and most grammatical markings.(か、が、を、に…) Katakana is most often used for foreign words and onomatopoeias. (アメリカ, モー)