Do Japanese letters work as full words AND separate letters?

[ReloadPsi]

There are 3 ways to write in Japanese: Hiragana, which is a phonetic alphabet; Katakana, which is a phonetic alphabet used to spell foreign words; and Kanji, which uses different characters for different words. Hehe, I've always wanted to use semicolons like that.

This is pretty much exactly it in a nutshell. However, Kanji has an additional use.

Seeing as a single Kanji character has a whole meaning of its own, there will be more than one way to pronounce it. For this reason, Kanji does get used to "customise" your surname: The "Nana" in "Nanahara" (Battle Royale character) was written using the kanji for "seven". Also, anyone who ever completed the first Zelda game on the NES will have seen that Shigeru Miyamoto's name was incorrectly transliterated as "Shigeru Miyahon". I'm assuming that the kanji for "moto" can also be "hon".

If you ever learn Japanese, you'll be able to do this with your own surname so long as you transliterate it into Japanese first; my surname, Ammundsen, could be "Amundosen", "Amunzen", "Anmundosen" and so forth when written in kana... so I could potentially use the kana for "A", the kanji for "mu" (if there is one anyway; mu means "void"), the kana for "n" and then either the kanji for "zen" (is that even a Japanese word?) or the kana for "do-se-n".