Acutally, katakana came before hiragana.
Katakana was introduced as grammatical markers because Japanese were having a hard time expressing themselves in just kanji.
katakana = �Љ���
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im american... so kanjis were a big blur to me when i started... and to be honest, now theyre more like a big wall between me and fluency!! but its not so bad... going at the rate i am at i hope to be ...
http://www.kanjistep.com has practice tests... i dont know how accurate they are though... i got a 100 on the level 3 and a 60 on level 2... but that was with a lot of guessing... i really dont even k ...