It could be said that Japanese is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn how to speak, but one of (if not the most) the hardest to write. Like English, Japanese adopted a writing system (i.e. a method of writing) from another language. In the case of English, it was the Latin alphabet that was adopted; as for Japanese, it was Chinese characters. However, as time went by the Japanese found that they had to change the method of writing invented by the Chinese to make it easier for Japanese people to write their language. So they created a syllable-based system of characters called Kana - that are used for mainly phonetic purposes. More recently, words written in the Latin alphabet (i.e. English letters) have been appearing Japanese with more and more frequency. In modern Japanese we find the following writing systems used:
In this program we will be focusing mainly upon Kanji. So we will be assuming that you have already learnt Hiragana, Katakana, and have a basic understand of Japanese.
Kanji make up a large part of the written Japanese language. Just like how English has an alphabet, spelling, numbers, and punctuation - Japanese has the same or similar things but with a different flavor. One simple way of thinking about the role of Kanji in Japanese writing is to think of Kanji as Japanese spelling. That is to say Kanji and spelling in English have similar functions - they eliminate confusion as to the meaning of words pronounced in the same way and they allow people to guess the meaning of words that they have never seen before.
Before we go any further, we need a bit of a history lesson to get us acquainted with the who, what, when and why of Chinese characters. Kanji (or as Chinese people call the characters Hanzi) were first created by the Han race of Chinese people. Thus if we look at the meaning of the individual characters that make up the word "Kanji" we can somewhat understand itts origins.
漢字
The first character 漢 was originally a name of a river. And as time went by the people who lived around that river began to call themselves by the name of the river - that is Han (in Chinese). So eventually this character came to mean 'the Han race' (漢族). The second character 字 means letter or character. Now if we combine the meanings of both characters we can see that the word Kanji literally means 'the characters of the Han people.'