Hiragana is used mainly for indigenous Japanese words and grammar, while katakana pertains primarily to foreign names and words to emphasize something, scientific terms, and onomatopoeia. Modern Japanese is a combination of logographic characters and kana, which comprises two syllabaries.
But it’s not the same as remembering 2000 or more stand-alone letters, which then have to join to form words. They seem to know 2000 to 5000 kanji, the basics they learn at school. Westerners depend on an alphabet with 26 letters that can make up words when we join them together, and it’s inconceivable that people in Japan can learn and remember so many characters. Even though mastering the kanji during the school years is not an easy task, you will get through life reasonably quickly if you can read and write all of them. The Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, or Japanese Dictionary, contains more than 50 000 characters and lists 530 000 compound words. The Japanese writing system is incredibly vast and complex. College-educated people can read between 30 kanji, depending on the level of study achieved. The Ministry of Education and Sciences requires everyone to know the joyo kanji, those in general use. Japanese children learn 1006 kanji in elementary school and about 1000 in secondary school. How many kanji do the Japanese people know, and how many do they need to know? But in Japan, there are 4 writing systems, including thousands of kanji, which are Chinese characters that most people know. In the “educated West,” many teenagers leave school unable to spell and use grammar correctly, using a language with only 26 letters.