hiragana
syllabary for words of Japanese origin
Hiragana is probably the first type of characters that one should learn. Eventhough katakana looks simpler and therefore maybe a bit easier to remember, hiragana is still the most important basics in Japanese. Besides, you have to learn both anyway...
Hiragana are the backbone of the Japanese language. They are primarily used for words and particles where there are no kanji. But since the hiragana is used to give the pronunciation of kanji, you can basicly write all words containing kanji in hiragana too.
As mentioned earlier under "Startup", I recommend printing out the hiragana and katakana tables and making a memo game with the characters. It's simple, but effective. Every time you get the answer right, the piece is removed from the game and every time the guess is wrong, you put the piece back into the pile. It takes some time at the start, but you'll learn to recognise the characters surprisingly fast.
Besides this game, one should aim to practice writing the characters everyday. If you do that, you'll remember them in no time!
The different hiragana characters are shown in the table below. The characters are placed from left to right after which vocal they are "using", meaning a, i, u, e or o.
From the line containing the "ga", the characters are basicly the same once again, but now theres an added "quotation" sign at the upper right corner.
To the right of these are the "combies". By taking characters containing i (ki, shi, chi etc.) and adding the character for ya, yu o yo you get kya, kyu, kyu etc. That's pretty much the basics!
A nice way to learn the kana is to use the LearnKana! applet at this site for beginners who want to learn hiragana and katakana.