Istrebitel Wrote:So it's hard to grasp the fact that they do.... aaaaand they don't at the same time! Like, 召 is seduce, but seduce is 誘惑.... 旦 is daybreak, but daybreak is 夜明け / 黎明.That's because the language comes first, then the writing system to represent the language (as Chris said above). When we say that a kanji "means" something, we're really saying that the kanji is used to represent words in Japanese that are associated with that meaning. It's less exact when English is being used because that creates one more level of separation between the Japanese words and the symbols used to represent them.
"yoake" means daybreak whether that word is spoken, written in romaji, written in hiragana, or written in the combination of kanji and hiragana that's standard.