I had an idea of the answer, but I checked here to make sure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_%28symbol%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_%28alphabet%29Basically a character is any sort of sign or symbol, and a letter is a single character used in an alphabet.
About the Japanese writing system: here is a link if you want to read about it on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_systemIn English we pretty much have only one way to write a certain word, by spelling it in our roughly phonetic alphabet. But in Japanese there are two or three ways to write something. They have characters descended from Chinese characters which stand for ideas or full syllables, in a way. Here are some links about this kind of writing system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_ChineseThey also have two other writing systems that they use. They are both phonetic systems, but are not like our alphabet. They are syllabaries, where each character represents a sound, or pair of sounds. For instance there is a character for "a," another for "ka," another for "ki," and so on. Here are some links about those writing systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiraganahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KatakanaThey also use the Latin alphabet. Here is a link about that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romaji
