漢字, or "kanji," are the logographic characters used in the writing systems of Chinese and Japanese. Each character represents a word or a meaningful part of a word, making them distinct from alphabetic systems. There are thousands of kanji, and they can be combined to form new meanings. In Japanese, kanji are often used alongside two other scripts: hiragana and katakana. While kanji convey meaning, hiragana is used for grammatical functions and native words, and katakana is used for foreign words. Learning kanji can be challenging due to their complexity and the number of characters.