How does Japanese Kanji work?

Question:

Alright I asked a question about kanji in a japanese name.
And I've got some wonderful answers.. the only problem? It doesn't make sense to me.

So my question now is: How does Kanji work? It is something you can't relate to the ABC can you? Would someone try to tell me how it works? I somehow get the thing that Kanji is a sort of drawing and that it has a meaning, like cow or something. But then I have another question.. How do you do it with names? Cuz you can't give someone the name cow right and pretend that it means something else :p... Alright now I am just joking, but really! I don't get it!

Please help me!
Thanks!

Answer:

You have part of it right. The explanation is kind of involved, but here goes -

Japanese names are made-up of words (kanji) that has literal meaning. That is because kanji are characters (actually we call them ideograms) that are of Chinese origin. The Japanese borrowed the Chinese character sets because they had no writing systems in their early history although obviously they had a spoken language. They needed a way to write down and record things and the only country/kingdom near Japan that had a writing system was China.

The problem is that the Japanese spoken language is better suited for some sort of alphabetical system such as those used in western european languages, but Japan had no contacts with the western culture until the 15th century, and hiragana and katagana did not exists at the time.

The Chinese character sets are symbols that had evolved over several thousands of years into what you see today. They began as simple pictograms representing objects, actions, or ideas. Because they are only representative of such things, the pronunciation of the object is up to the person using it.

For example, the Japanese name Nakayama which is made up of two Chinese characters - middle and mountain. In Chinese, it would be pronounced as ZHON-SHAN, but the Japanese word for "middle" is pronounced NAKA and "mountain" is YAMA. Two different ways to pronounced it, but only one way to write it. Sometimes, the Japanese preserve the Chinese pronunciation for certain words, but the problem is that when the Japanese borrowed the Chinese writing system, they did it not all at once but at 2 or 3 different times over a course of a thousand years and the way a word was pronunced in Chinese could change, so you could actually pronounce kanji 3 different ways - the Japanese way, and the 2 other ways that was pronounced in Chinese.

Because the words/kanji that is used for a name has meaning, you always ALWAYS added an honorific such as SAN at the end of the name. You would never address someone only as NAKAYAMA, but NAKAYAMA-SAN. To omit the SAN is basically calling the person a thing and not a human being. There are no Mr. Cow in Japanese, but if there were you would distingush a person's name from the word cow by the honorific -SAN.

There are only a limited name of surnames in Japanese - 2,232 only. There is a possibility that a further +500 will be recognized but not as of yet.

The idea of ideograms such as the Chinese character sets and Kanji are not something only from ancient past. If you look around you today, especially at places that are opened to the public, you will see signs such as the picture or symbol of man and woman for the restrooms. In airports, you will see a symbol that looks like a plate with a knife and fork on the side to tell travelers of a place to eat regardless of what language they speak,