One of the three writing systems of Japanese, Kanji, originates from Chinese, and so they are basically chinese characters. A fluent reader should be able to read about ~2,000 of them, and thankfully, they're made up of smaller components which helps to memorize and write. For example,

All of these kanji contain 艮 as a subcomponent. I've been using jpdb to memorize these components, and because the kanji for "good" is 良, they call this component "almost good" (get it?). But this produces a very fun pattern. The kanji for gold is 金 and the kanji for silver is 銀, if you think about the olympics, what is "almost as good as gold"?