Meanings

Each character represents a unique concept, and hence, to represent lots of different concepts, you need a lot of kanji. Concepts can also be built up out of other concepts, so often two kanji written together will produce a new word. This reduces the number somewhat, but there are still about 2000 kanji in regular use in Japanese and if you intend to master the language completely, you will need to know these. There are more, but they tend only to appear in technical terms.

Some examples: the kanji for "book" is read "hon":

and the kanji for "shelf" is read "tana":

and they can be put together to create "hondana" or "bookshelf":

Of course, it isn't always that easy. Notice also that the pronunciation can change depending on the combination - it is "hondana", not "hontana".

Radicals

Each kanji can also be broken down into constituent parts called "radicals", which may in themselves be more basic kanji. For example, the kanji for "fish" appears in virtually every other character that represents a particular type of fish, and the kanji for "tree" appears in the kanji for types of tree, things made of wood, or things connected in some way with wood. Thus, the kanji might also contain clues as to its meaning. But, just in case you thought this was easy, sometimes the radicals seem quite random.

For example:

A shelf is made of wood, oak and birch are types of trees, but frost is difficult to understand from the character.

On-yomi and Kun-yomi

One of the biggest problems with reading Japanese has a historical origin. When kanji were brought from China to Japan (probably through Korea, but see the History and Origins page for details), Japanese already had words for concepts such as "look", "light", etc. However, the kanji also had their Chinese reading, meaning that the number of words was doubled up. What seems to have happened is that the Japanese put both readings onto the kanji, but used them in different ways: that is, when using a concept that is expressed by one kanji (such as many simple verbs such as "run", "look", "hear" and so on), the Japanese reading ("kun-yomi" or meaningful reading) is used. When it took two kanji to represent a word, the Chinese readings ("on-yomi" or sound reading) were used. There are plenty of exceptions, however. Furthermore, sometimes there were two concepts in Chinese represented by separate kanji but in Japanese only one kanji is used for both. Thus, you have several possible meanings for each kanji - usually two, but sometimes many more.

While this might seem incredibly complicated... it is. But once you start learning the language, it all falls into place and you will start to recognise when to use each reading. The hiragana also help: suffixes and word endings are represented by hiragana when using the kun-yomi or Japanese reading, so they serve as a guide to which pronunciation is used. Also, when in combination with other kanji, invariably the on-yomi is used. Hence, in the example above, the kanji for "to send" is read "okuru" (kun-yomi) when alone but is always read "sou" (the on-yomi) when in combination with other kanji.

Different readings also have slightly divergent meanings too. For example, when you read the kanji for sun as "nichi" it means "day", but when you read it as "hi" it tends to mean "sun". There is a wealth of meaning in kanji, and the combination of the three scripts - kanji, hiragana and katakana - make Japanese a challenge to learn but a highly rewarding one in so many ways.

Whether to learn to read or not

Some people try to learn Japanese without learning the scripts, thinking that it is too difficult for them or will take too long. While it is true that it is difficult, it is more a matter of time and persevering than being that intellectually challenging. Also, if you really want to master Japanese, you cannot understand the language deeply without knowing kanji - they are the basis of meaning. Other reasons for learning to read and write the language include that you cannot study in a university in Japan in Japanese without being able to read and write, and it gives you a completely different way of understanding the world and organising ideas - it is the key to an entirely different way of thinking - unless you are a native Chinese or Korean speaker.