First post: Magic in Japan

My son won a Magic the Gathering tournament last Saturday (ironically the day after the earthquake). He will be reimbursed for roundtrip planefare to Nagoya, Japan - a city that I have never even heard of. It is the fourth largest city in Japan, a ways south of Tokyo and somewhat inland. Thus it was not so damaged by the quake nor the tsunami.
Anyway I have decided to try learning some Japanese from textfugu.com. It suggested that I start a learnign blog.
The first thing that we did is talk about the four different Japanese alphabets:
Romaji an Latin alphabet transliteration. Apparently this sucks for actually learning Japanese and using it in Japan so Koichi of textfugo recommeds that we not learn it. We will be learning Hiragana first. There is also Katakana and Kanji. Kanji is based on Chinese characters, has multiple pronunciations for each (based on multiple introductions for China) and has symbols for nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Hiragana is used for suffixes (-san honorific for example) and particles ("am", "are" and "and" forms of to be of course are important) and for inflecting verbs and adjectives. Katakana looks like it is used for constructed words such as foreign, scientific and onomatopoetic words; it is also used for emphasis. He said that often menus are written katakana so maybe I will cram some right before the trip.
Thats it for now. Off to learn Hiragana!