Kanji or Chinese characters don't express pronunciation like Hiragana/Katakana or English letters. They express an idea. You have to memorize their readings one-by-one which is why it angers a lot of people. Japanese use of Kanji is even harder because each Kanji has lots of readings.

I found by accident this blog and now I really treasure it. It is not supposed to teach you Japanese, but it is a huge source for material that will help you to learn Japanese. Enjoy it:

日本語-出来ます

Kanji is a writing system, not pronunciation. Speaking and listening have nothing to do with kanji.

And that site is not good. The misspellings in English should be a clue.

I hope you meant "Are all written in Katakana"

bahahaha :'D

no way, real estate?!

What do you mean with kanji are 2 or more hiragana? You mean as sound? 気 is pronounced KI, which is only one hiragana.
Kanji is an ideogram (spell?) which is a drawing which include an idea of something in it. Basically a kanji is a word itself. Hiragana and katakana are alphabets, with the difference that Japanese alphabet works with syllables and not with single letters (with just few exception which are the vowels and the N).

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?

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).

Actually a friend from Japan stopped me from writing こんにちは (konnichiha) in kanji 今日は. He told me that it might be mixed up with きょうは (kyouha), which means today. So I always write konnichiha in hiragana.

I have been studying japanese for two years by myself now and i still use kids web to help me out it is a really great page for those who have just started to learn japanese

Kids Web Japan


http://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/ tv tokyo's home page is actually a great page to learn and write certain words in japanese

also a good tip try and make a dictionary japanese\english whit the words you know in japanese and then ad the english word like "sugoi" means incredible and so on, this way you can keep track of how many words you know and practice whit them in a dialogue

another tip is that you can use an old\new note book print out the katakana and hiragana chart paste it inside the notebook and then you start to write sentences in japanese first romaji then you try and write the same sentence but now you write in katakana and then you can try and write it in hiragana


these are some of my study methods i came up whit when i started to learn japanese i really hope i helped you some what:vsign: