There are about 3,000 commonly used kanji characters including the 1,945 daily use characters, and 46 hiragana and katakana characters each. One aspect of the language that makes it difficult for foreigners to grasp quickly is the learn Japanese software presence of many words which are pronounced the same but have different meanings. For example; hana can be “flower” or “nose”, ame for “rain” or “candy”. Knowing kanji helps in this aspect of learning as each of these words can be easily recognized by kanji.