Kanji

kanji 漢字 is the Japanese term for the Chinese characters used in the written Japanese language. They take on their own pronunciation and usage in Japanese, but they often have the same meaning as they do in Chinese.

The same character can have different pronunciations and/or meanings depending on the context. (Example: 中 (naka) in 中手 (nakade) and 中 (chuu) in 中盤 (chuuban).)

To learn more, see Halpern's outline of the Japanese writing system.

See also Benjamin Barrett's multilingual go dictionary for pretty much every go term.

See also:

• Japanese language: hiragana and katakana
• Japanese Go terms for the kanji used to write Go terms
• Basic Japanese for reading go books
• ON reading
• KUN reading
• the Wikipedia article on kanji