Bloody and Milov's Japanese page. Open to anyone!

Romaji - Romanized Japanese. Basically Japanese words spelled in Enlish/Latin letters. Do not learn Japanese if you only plan on using Romaji. You NEED to know Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji for Japanese.

Hiragana - I wouldn't say most commonly used form of Japanese alphabet, but I recommend starting out with this. It takes up to two weeks to learn at most. They're rounder and more feminine than Katakana. たべます

Katakana - I recommend learning this second. It's used most commonly for mangas, store signs, and borrowed words from other languages. It's must easier and faster to learn. ネコ

Kanji - The reason most people are scared away from learning Japanese. The almost 2000 symbols for most words out there. In Japan, you would learn all of the symbols by Grade 10. The only thing you need to do to learn all of them without any problems is to love them. Don't get frustrated and give up. Memorizing maybe 5 to 10 a day can really help. Kanji is borrowed from Chinese, but have two different ways to read them. ON reading and KUN reading. ON is the Chinese way to say it, and KUN is the Japanese way to say it and meaning. By itself, you would read the symbol by it's KUN reading, but put into compound words with other kanji symbols, you might have to read it all together by their ON readings.

Ex. The word for Aluminum foil is gingami 銀紙
The Kanji for it is made up of the two symbols, the two symbols meaning 'silver' 銀 and 'paper' 紙. The ON reading for 'silver' is gin and the KUN reading is Shirogane. Since it was put into a compound word to make a new word, we used the ON reading as mentioned above.
But we don't use the ON reading for compound words all the time, for the 'paper' part, the KUN reading for it kami only changes to gami to make the rest of the word.
Hopefully this made sense to you, if not, just ask and I'll try to explain it better.

to distinguish between the ON and KUN readings, the ON reading will usually be in all Capitals GIN and the KUN reading won't shirogane

Particles
small words that go between other words, like 'wa' and 'no'

Wa - marks the topic, like 'watashi wa' which makes 'I' the subject. Basically means is, am, are, etc.

Ga - marks the subject. Almost exactly like 'wa'. The topic is like the one talking, 'I' and the subject is what 'I' is talking about, like say a cake. If you have something like 'the cake is' it wouldn't be 'keki wa' it would be 'keki ga'. 'Watashi wa keki ga..."

No - bascially 's and of. Possessive. 'Watashi no neko' = my cat

Ni - shows indirect object, who or what the verb is directed to. Like in 'Jacob gave the movie to Amy' Amy would be the indirect object and the movie would be the direct one.

E - emphasizes a destination [not really sure what it does]

De - shows where the verb takes place

O/Wo - shows what the direct object is to the verb. Like the cat running

Ne - you know how Canadians say 'eh?' yeah it's basically that

Ka - put it at the end to make it a question. Basically like a second question mark. '...ka?'

to - 'and', but only for objects, never for phrases and clauses

mo - 'also' and 'too'. Can also mean 'any'

yo - emphasizes an action or an order. If you watch InuYasha, 'Osuwari yo!'

na - when a semi-adjective modifies a nou in a straightforward manner, na goes in between. 'That's a big dog!' 'Ooki na inu desu' [Yeah I don't get it either]

Sentences

English it goes: Pronoun, verb, object
Japanese it goes: Pronoun, object, verb

The verb always goes at the end of the sentence.

Watashi wa ookami to inu ga suki
[watashi] [ookami to inu] [suki]
[wolves and dogs] [like]

But Japanese is pretty flexible, and once you master the sentence order it's pretty easy to make sentences with the words you know.

Also in Japanese, say like you're telling someone to meet you somewhere at a certain time, they prefer the time said before the the place.

Assuming you know what a clause is, you know that in every sentence with clauses, there's one clause that can just be a phrase all of it's own. The independent clause. There's also the dependent clause which without the independent clause, is nowhere near being a proper sentence.
In Japanese, they like to have the independent clause AFTER the dependent clause.