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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.
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.
The reforms made after the Second World War have had a particularly significant impact on accepted kanji usage in the modern Japanese language.. On 12 November 1945, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper published an editorial concerning the abolition of kanji, and on 31 March 1946, the first American Education Delegation arrived in Japan at the invitation of the Supreme Commander for the Allied ...
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 "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.
In other words, kanji are used for their sounds, not their meanings. There was no standard system for choice of kanji, and different ones could be used to represent the same sound, with the choice made on the whims of the writer. By the end of the 8th century, 970 kanji were in use to represent the 90 morae of Japanese. [6]
Katakana is used to indicate the on'yomi (Chinese-derived readings) of a kanji in a kanji dictionary. For instance, the kanji 人 has a Japanese pronunciation, written in hiragana as ひと hito (person), as well as a Chinese derived pronunciation, written in katakana as ジン jin (used to denote groups of people).
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 ...