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Kanji (漢字, pronounced ⓘ) are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from 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 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.
For example, in Japan, 必 is written with the top dot first, while the traditional stroke order writes the 丿 first. In the characters 王 and 玉, the vertical stroke is the third stroke in Chinese, but the second stroke in Japanese. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use traditional characters, though with an altered stroke order.
By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding Hanja characters. Until the contemporary period, Korean documents, history, literature and records were written primarily in Literary Chinese using Hanja as its primary script.
In Japanese, Chinese characters are referred to as kanji. During the Nara period (710–794), readers and writers of kanbun —the Japanese term for Literary Chinese writing—began utilizing a system of reading techniques and annotations called kundoku. When reading, Japanese speakers would adapt the syntax and vocabulary of Literary Chinese ...
Shinjitai (Japanese: 新字体, "new character form") are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in simplified Chinese characters, but shinjitai is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification.
'old character forms') are the traditional forms of kanji (Chinese written characters used in Japanese writing). [1] Their simplified counterparts are shinjitai (新字体, 'new character forms'). Some of the simplified characters arose centuries ago and were in everyday use in both China and Japan, but
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes—which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. [2]