Do japenese characters have sounds like the alphabet or is each symbol a separate world?
As for Japanese, in some cases they are like alphabet (sounds), and in some other cases they are symbols that can represent words by themselves. There are 3 types of Japanese characters: (1) Hiragana ひらがな (2) Katakana カタカナ (3) Kanji 漢字 The first two types are like alphabet in the sense that they are just sounds. However Kanji refers to a set of characters borrowed from China, and they have meanings by their own. A kanji can be a word by itself, like for example (手) which means “hand”, and pronounced “te”. Moreover, combination of Kanji can create new words, like for example （空手）which means “Karate”; a famous Japanese martial art. Here the character 空 means “empty”, and the character 手 means “te” as I mentioned above. Reading Kanji is not easy, because each character can have many way of readings. For example 車 (car) reads “kuruma”. However, in the combination 電車 (train), it reads “sha”. Theoretically speaking, you can write Japanese using Hiragana only, but if you do so, your writing w
