ガンバッテ！

Katakana and Hiragana is the Japanese syllabaries. There is also Romaji. While I studied at the institute, I studied Japanese. As you can understand Japanese can write down any own word on any of the three alphabets. They used hieroglyphs as a respect for tradition, I think. If you are going to continue to study the language, I suggest you find the book, which will help you to remember associations of hieroglyphs. There are a logical sequences to a gradually memorization there. For example: imagine a figure, legs is wide apart. It is a confident person. It is a "man": 人.
The man open the hands wide. Apparently, this angler tells about a big fish he caught. Hieroglyph «big» looks like this: 大.
A large and adult man with a hat is the head of the family. Hieroglyph husband forms by an additional horizontal line (it is a hat): 夫.
And if the big is a huge enough that it is able to get to the heavens, we have to switch to notion "Sky". Code the definition: the sky is big and you will never forget that means if you will meet the hieroglyph in the text:天.
Imagine a man. He waves his arms and shouts "fire": 火.

I showed you a way of remembering. By the way, Japanese pupils memorize the hieroglyphs without any associations.

I found a book on Russian. Surely there are similar books on Italian. Good luck!

Once you conquer the initial hurdle of the writing system I find that Japanese is the opposite of other languages. It gets easier and seemingly less complex the longer you stick with it. Just keep writing the damn things out and you can have kana down in 1 hour tops.

True , haha . mostly with kanji though

I'm learning Japanese and Kana from a game called Influent

http://playinfluent.com/

It teaches you the romaji, Kana and kanji.

I'm writing down the kana as i learn and it's helped me a lot.