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Kanji (漢字, Japanese pronunciation:) are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. [1] They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana.
Written Japanese uses several different scripts: kanji (Chinese characters), 2 sets of kana (phonetic syllabaries) and roman letters. While kana and roman letters can be typed directly into a computer, entering kanji is a more complicated process as there are far more kanji than there are keys on most keyboards.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
' explanatory reading ' [1] [a]) is the way of reading kanji characters using the native Japanese word that matches the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. [2] [3] [4] This pronunciation is contrasted with on'yomi, which is the reading based on the original Chinese pronunciation of the character.
Around the same time, the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JIS) also attempted to create a standardised kanji character set for use in computing and word processing, and to assign a unique character code to each kanji for data processing. This character set was, like the jōyō kanji, merely a subset of the thousands of documented kanji ...
The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography.It was developed c. 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō. [2] [citation needed] Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography.
However, in kanbun texts it is relatively common to use a large amount of furigana—often there is an interest in recovering the readings used by people of the Heian or Nara periods, and since many kanji can be read either with on'yomi or kun'yomi pronunciations in a kanbun text, the furigana can show at least one editor's opinion of how it ...
The kanji for tasuki, a kokuji, alongside the furigana for tasuki (above). In Japanese, kokuji (国字, "national characters") or wasei kanji (和製 漢字, "Japanese-made kanji") are kanji created in Japan rather than borrowed from China. Like most Chinese characters, they are primarily formed by combining existing characters - though using ...