Kanji are the characters used to write Chinese, Japanese and Korean although the Japanese and Korean languages also have independent alphabets, as well. Kanji are characters derived from ideograms believed to have emerged in China about 1,000 B.C. Early kanji were essentially "word pictures" which over a period of thousands of years developed into more stylized, sophisticated characters. A good example of this is the kanji for sun. When we think of the sun the image is usually circular. In ancient China, the original ideograph for sun was a circle with a dot in the middle representing its center. Over the years, the character for sun gradually became more stylized. Today it is recognized by people throughout China, Korea and Japan as .

Kanji was introduced to Japan in the 5th and 6th centuries as Buddhist priests traveled between the two countries. Because each character already had a Chinese pronunciation associated with it, the Japanese learned the Chinese pronunciation and then began using the characters to represent existing Japanese words which were quite different from the Chinese in pronounciation.

Although there are over 50,000 kanji, in Japan today only about 3,000 are used and of that close to 2,000 of them have been designated by the government for daily use. Japanese students must master these 2,000 kanji in order to graduate from high school. Japan's literacy rate is one of the highest in the world rating at 98.9% of the population, which for the Japanese, means being able to read all 2,000 of the required kanji in addition to mastering both hiragana and katakana. Since the introduction of the first Japanese-language word processor in 1978 and the recent popularity of the computer, although most Japanese today are able to read at least the basic 2,000 kanji, many people have difficulty writing the more complex characters.

While many characters are based on ideograms like (hi, prounounced,"hē") or sun, most characters are made up of combinations of characters. A very simple example is the character (mei) which means clearness, shining or discernment. The left-side of the character is for sun, and the right-side is (tsuki) for moon. Thus its meaning. As a matter of fact, the character was derived from the ideogram of the crescent moon.

Since it is impossible to know the pronunciation of kanji without learning it specifically, Japanese rely on kanji dictionaries which are essentially organized by the total number of strokes it takes to write each character. Characters are also organized based on the root characters which comprise a given character. In this way, we are able to look up the character (mei) by using the root character on the left-side which happens to be (hi).