Kanji - Japanese Writing System
Many cultures use letters from other cultures to form their own writing system. Much of these English letters you are reading now are based on the orignal Greek letters alpha - beta - gamma - delta etc. The Japanese got their Kanji characters from the Chinese around the year 400.
The English language is based on letters meaning sounds. You can look at c-a-t and know it is said "cat" even if you don't know what a "cat" is. With Kanji, each shape represents an idea. So you would have a symbol that stood for cat, another that stood for tree, and so on. There are over 50,000 separate characters, each standing for different words. For normal everyday use, though, most people only need 2,000 or so.
The Japanese also have kana, which are sound-related letters, for spelling out words that there are no kanji for.
Kanji began as actual pictures of items. The cat kanji looked sort of like a cat. But over time, the shapes became stylized and now it is often difficult to tell what a particular kanji means unless you know.
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