meaning: sea
reading: カイ、うみ、うな
海水（カイスイ）: sea water
海洋（カイヨウ）: the sea(s), the ocean
海外（カイガイ）: abroad, overseas
日本海（ニホンカイ）: the Japan Sea
雲海（ウンカイ）: a sea of clouds
海（うみ）: sea
海千山千（うみセンやまセン）（の）: hard-bitten, tested
海原（うなばら）: an ocean, the open sea
Other readings
海女（あま）: a woman diver
海苔（のり）: nori seaweed
#海 is made of さんずいへん（氵）which suggests some association with water and 毎 which means “every”. I guess everything came out of 海, so this makes sense, doens’t it?
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EasyJapaneseE
17 July 2019 at 7:07 amThank you for your comment. As you know, kanji are from China. They were brought to Japan from China and ancient Japanese people used them to scribe the language they were speaking, Japanese. They also imported many words from Chinese – characters, meaning and sound altogether. The kanji reading of these imported Chinese words is called 音読み（おんよみ） and the reading which is originally Japanese is called 訓読み（くんよみ）. When we differentiate these two, 音読み is usually written in Katakana and 訓読み is written in Hiragana, so I follow the same system here.
In the case of this kanji 海, カイ is 音読み – originally Chinese, and うみ and うな are 訓読み（くんよみ）- originally Japanese.
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Lorenzo
17 July 2019 at 6:01 amWhy It Is used katakana to write the pronunciation of kanji?