Kanji, also known as Chinese characters, represent words or concepts in Japanese.

A single kanji character can have multiple meanings, and its pronunciation can change depending on the context or the word it is used in.

A kanji can stand alone as a word or be combined with another kanji or hiragana to form a word.

For example, the word "love" can be written in one kanji:

On the other hand, the word "to meet" or "to see" is written in both kanji and hiragana:

This is a good example of kanji-hiragana combination.

You might be wondering why we even use kanji when we can write everything in hiragana and katakana.

The easiest way to answer your question is by looking at an example: はし.

This word is pronounced "Hashi" and it actually has three meanings :

There is no way to know the meaning if it's written in hiragana without context.

That's where kanji comes in!

Each kanji has its own meaning, and even without context, we know the meaning of the word.

And not only does kanji give meaning to words, but it also helps us read Japanese text more easily.

If you already had a chance to read in Japanese, you might have had this problem.

Because Japanese is written without spaces, and if a sentence is only written in hiragana, it can be hard to tell where each word begins and ends.

For example:

There are 5 words including particles in this sentence.

ともだちとあそびにいく

Of course, if you don’t know any words in Japanese, there is no way to know where a word starts and ends.

But even for native speakers, it can be challenging to read a sentence that's only written in hiragana, especially if it's a long one.

So reading texts only written in Hiragana is like reading English texts without any spaces between words!

Of course, the sentence I wrote is very simple, so it's easy for native speakers to read, but you get the idea.

Now here is the same sentence with kanji:

If you don't know each word and its corresponding kanji, it's still not possible to read the sentence but we, native speakers, can much more easily read and understand the meaning of the sentence at a glance.

Because a word in Japanese can start with a kanji and end with a hiragana, but never start with hiragana and end with a kanji.

This means that whenever we come across a kanji, we can be sure that it's the start of a word.

To sum it up, kanji plays a crucial role in the Japanese language, not only providing meaning to words but also makes reading and understanding texts a lot easier.