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Since kanji are essentially Chinese hanzi used to write Japanese, the majority of characters used in modern Japanese still retain their Chinese meaning, physical resemblance with some of their modern traditional Chinese characters counterparts, and a degree of similarity with Classical Chinese pronunciation imported to Japan from the 5th to 9th ...
Wasei-kango (Japanese: 和製漢語, "Japanese-made Chinese words") are those words in the Japanese language composed of Chinese morphemes but invented in Japan rather than borrowed from China. Such terms are generally written using kanji and read according to the on'yomi pronunciations of the characters.
The "Grade" column specifies the grade in which the kanji is taught in Elementary schools in Japan. Grade "S" means that it is taught in secondary school . 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.
[12] [13] [14] Such words which use certain kanji to name a certain Japanese word solely for the purpose of representing the word's meaning regardless of the given kanji's on'yomi or kun'yomi, a.k.a. jukujikun, is not uncommon in Japanese. Other original names in Chinese texts include Yamatai country (邪馬台国), where a Queen Himiko lived.
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.
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as kango (Japanese: 漢語, pronounced, "Han words"), is a subset of Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or was created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese.
Kanbun, literally "Chinese writing," refers to a genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese. For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages' different structures. As I have mentioned, Chinese is an isolating language.
The common Chinese word wú (無) was adopted in the Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies. The Japanese kanji 無 has on'yomi readings of mu or bu, and a kun'yomi (Japanese reading) of na. It is a fourth-grade kanji. [3] The Korean hanja 無 is read mu (in Revised, McCune–Reischauer, and Yale romanization systems).