Quote:
Originally Posted by dougbrowne
Any questions?
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I know what you are trying to say but I think you made it very muddy.
Hiragana/Katakana/Roman Alphabet only expresses sound and not meaning.
Kanji is the opposite, it expresses meaning but no sound.
Kanji is Chinese characters, it was designed for Chinese, not Japanese which is in a completely different language family. Because Japanese uses Kanji, it essentially created 2 classes of words. Sino(Chinese)-Japanese and native Japanese words. As a result of this, most Kanji in Japanese have 2 readings (or more).
ON Reading is the Japanese approximation of the original Chinese reading and it is used for expressing complex ideas and used when a Chinese-derived word is used.
KUN Reading is literally just a native Japanese
translation of the
meaning of the Kanji into pure Japanese.
Example: 飲
When the Japanese first saw this character and was told it means to drink, they fished out a word in native Japanese, のむ and they assigned this reading to the character whenever they want to express the idea of to drink.
At the same time, they were told that this character's Chinese pronounciation is イン and this word, in Chinese, when combined with other characters, can mean lots of things that native Japanese can't express concisely such as:
飲用水（いんようすい） - Drinking water. There is no word in native Japanese that can express this idea without it becoming a sentence. So what the Japanese did is they just used this Chinese word verbatim in Japanese, including the Chinese pronciation (ON reading).