What does the Kanji symbol mean?

Answer

Kanji is not just one symbol. It's a group of characters that make up the Japanese written language. Along with kanji, there is also katakana and hiragana. If I'm not mistaken all three of these combined form what is called Kana or "Japanese symbols", which is basically the Japanese "alphabet", though this is rather oversimplified.

Kanachart.com is just one of many online references where you can see and learn a few of the ''thousands'' of Japanese characters.

There is also Romaji. This is where Japanese words are spelled out more or less phonetically using the Roman (our) alphabet.

In Romaji:

• one - ichi
• two - ni
• three - san
• four - yon
• five = go

The function of Kanji is tell to the reader what's the main idea of a word, verb etc. You use Kanji to write the main part of a word, and Hiragana to write its declinations and variant parts. In Japanese, to be totally fluent in Kanji, you need to know 2,000 of them.

Each Kanji has different readings (some may have Chinese and Japanese readings). The right reading depends of the rest the word, or by context you can guess.

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