kana

(JP: 仮名 or かな; PR: "ka-na")
These are phonetic Japanese characters: they have an associated sound but no meaning.

Kana characters were derived from kanji characters in order to allow the writing of vernacular Japanese. They are used for things like conjugating verbs (not a feature of the Chinese language), indicating the subject, object, etc. in sentences (again, not a feature of Chinese: word order indicates function), and writing foreign words. An example of a kana character is あ, which is pronounced a and was derived from the kanji 安.

There are two sets of kana characters, hiragana and katakana, each of which is comprised of 46 characters. The word kana (or hiragana, 平仮名) also denotes a highly cursive and uniquely Japanese style of calligraphy in which kanji and kana characters are written with thin, elegant brushstrokes.