The Japanese script used primarily for native words and grammatical elements is hiragana.
Hiragana is a phonetic Japanese syllabary, meaning its symbols represent sounds rather than the meanings associated with Chinese characters. Modern Japanese writing normally combines hiragana with kanji and katakana, allowing each script to perform a different job within the same sentence.
Hiragana is especially important for grammatical and function words, including particles, and for okurigana: kana suffixes attached to kanji roots to show verb and adjective inflections. It also represents native words that lack commonly used kanji, or words whose kanji would seem unusually formal or difficult. Children and beginners often use it before they learn the relevant kanji.
A common mix-up is katakana, which is also phonetic but is used mainly for foreign loanwords, many names, emphasis, and sound effects. Kanji are meaning-bearing Chinese characters adapted into Japanese, while romaji is simply Japanese written with the Latin alphabet. Hiragana historically developed from cursive forms of kanji through man’yōgana.