Correct me if I’m wrong but Kanji don’t have “meanings.” They are just parts of the words.
That’s actually where you’re probably wrong
You might say, symbols in different writing systems can have different degrees of abstraction. If you’re interested, you might want to read up on terms like pictograms, ideograms, logograms and the like.
As a short overview (and to the best of my own limited understanding
): Pictograms are stylized or simplified drawings of physical objects, that developed into symbols representing those objects. Pictograms are a part of the larger category of ideograms, which also include symbols that represent abstract ideas. Ideograms are generally not connected to specific sounds or to a specific language.You might say, they carry meaning, and only meaning.
Logograms are at a greater abstraction level, so to speak. They can represent a sound (or multiple sounds, see kun’yomi vs. on’yomi vs. nanori), and they represent elements of a specific language (so they’re less universal than ideograms). Logograms are kind of “middle ground”, as they carry meaning and sound.
Alphabets and syllabaries are even more abstract than logograms. They carry only sound, the original meaning of the characters isn’t used anymore. For example, the origins of the latin “A” are probably in a pictogram representing an ox head, but today we use the letter “A” in all kings of words. The origins of the letter “B” are probably in a pictogram representing a house, and so fort. Over the centuries and milennia, those developed in the alphabet characters we’re familiar with today.
Kanji are logograms. That means, they carry sound and meaning. In modern Japanese, there’s something called ateji. That refers to the use of kanji just as phonetical representations, without regard to their underlying meaning. But in general, with kanji you need to take the sounds / readings and the meaning into account.
There are other quite interesting aspects to the variety of writing systems. For example, (to my knowledge) the Japanese writing systems don’t know a canonical order. We learn in grade school (or before that) in what order the A, B, C and so on goes. But with kana and kanji, there’s no equivalent to an “alphabetical order”. It would be… interesting to have a little kid recite tens of thousands of kanji in the correct order, anyway 