I've been learning Hiragana for a few days. How long should I be practicing these things. Should I just go straight ahead for Katakana and learn them both at the same time or do it sepearately?
First of all, Japanese hiragana and katakana are made from kanji. Hiragana is a corruption of Kanji, and Katakana is a partial derivation of Kanji. The reason why kanji are still used in Japan is that, unlike in English, there are no spaces between words in Japanese. Therefore, kanji and hiragana are used to make it easier to distinguish between words when looking at a sentence.