The Kanji represent ideas in Japanese as well as Chinese. The three alphabets of Japanese are Kanji, Katakana, and Hiragana. Hiragana and Katakana both use characters to represent sound, like the english alphabet. Each of those alphabets has 46 characters. Things are spelled out with those two. Kanji, on the other had, has thousands of characters. Each Kanji can mean different things and be pronounced in different ways. Often, the have katakana or hiragana symbols over them to clear up meanings. Fun language
