[dougbrowne]

To explain Kanji a bit clearer..

Hiragana and Katakana are both alphabets similar to the roman one we use for english. Each character represents the sound that it makes when pronounced and nothing more, the characters have no meaning until you form a word with them. In the romaji, the letter b makes the sound b but has no meaning to it what so ever, until you combine it with other letters like ullet to form bullet, bullet is a word and has a meaning of it's own.

Onto Kanji. Kanji is mainly used because things written in Hiragana and Katakana don't really have a shape to them like in romaji, for example, you can write tinhgs and you can still see that is says things, but if you were to write knnochiniwa in Hiragana you probably would not be able to read it as konnichiwa. But on the other hand, every kanji has a different shape and meaning unique to it, and when you see a specific kanji, that meaning instantly sparks in your head. If everything was written in the kanas, things would be hard to read, but kanji solve that problem.

Kanji have a meaning and a few readings to them. There are two types of readings for each kanji, ON reading and KUN reading. Generally you use the ON pronunciation/reading when the kanji is used next to 1 or more kanji and the KUN reading/pronunciation is used when the kanji is used by itself or side by side with kana (kana is short for hiragana and katakana)

Some Examples:

To drink -

Romaji - nomu
Hiragana - のむ
Kanji - 飲む

All three of these are pronounced "nomu" and mean the verb to drink. The most common one you would see written is the kanji form.

飲 is pronounced as no in this situation
and the む (pronounced mu) is added next to the kanji to be able to conjugate it to present, negative, past, past negative, etc. For example to say drink in the past tense, you would say "nomanai" which is written as
飲まない

As you can see the kanji meaning to drink was left alone but the kana changed to represent the new conjugation..

Sorry if Im confusing you but in a nutshell, the kanas have sounds to them but no meaning, while each kanji has it's own meaning (and pronunciation/reading)

Any questions?