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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.
1931: The former jōyō kanji list was revised and 1,858 characters were specified. 1942: 1,134 characters as standard jōyō kanji and 1,320 characters as sub-jōyō kanji were specified. 1946: The 1,850 characters of tōyō kanji were adopted by law "as those most essential for common use and everyday communication". [1]
The tōyō kanji (当用漢字, lit. "general-use kanji") are those kanji listed on the Tōyō kanji hyō (当用漢字表, literally "list of general-use kanji"), which was released by the Japanese Ministry of Education (文部省) on 16 November 1946, following a reform of kanji characters of Chinese origin in the Japanese language.
The list is sorted by Japanese reading (on'yomi in katakana, then kun'yomi in hiragana), in accordance with the ordering in the official Jōyō table. This list does not include characters that were present in older versions of the list but have since been removed ( 勺 , 銑 , 脹 , 錘 , 匁 ).
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.
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.
'Kana' is a compound of kari (仮, 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na (名, 'name'), which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. [2]Today it is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana which were "true" kanji used for their meanings.
A list of all jōyō kanji according to Halpern's KKLD indexing system, with the kyōiku kanji coloured according to grade level. 1946 created with 881 characters; 1977 expanded to 996 characters; 1982 expanded to 1,006 characters; 2020 expanded to 1,026 characters The following 20 characters, all used in prefecture names, were added in 2020. [1]