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Kanji (漢字, pronounced ⓘ) 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.
Originally, the on'yomi for kanji attempted to closely match the Middle Chinese pronunciation for each character, while guided by the possible sounds and structures of Japanese as spoken at the time. In fact a number of new word shapes entered the language to accommodate the large influx of Chinese borrowings.
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.
Kunrei-shiki romanization is a slightly modified version of Nihon-shiki which eliminates differences between the kana syllabary and modern pronunciation. For example, the characters づ and ず are pronounced identically in modern Japanese, and thus Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn ignore the difference in kana and represent the sound in the same way (zu).
Japanese speakers have readings of Chinese origin called on'yomi for many words, such as for "ginko" (銀行) or "Tokyo" (東京), but use kun'yomi when the kanji represents a native word such as the reading of 行 in 行く (iku) or the reading of both characters in "Osaka" (大阪), as well as a system that aids Japanese speakers with a ...
The two Kokuji 働 and 畑 in the Kyōiku Kanji List, which have no Chinese equivalents, are not listed here; in Japanese, neither character was affected by the simplifications. No simplification in either language (The following characters were simplified neither in Japanese nor in Chinese.)
Chinese texts were broken into meaningful blocks, and in the spaces were inserted hanja used to represent the sound of native Korean grammatical endings. As literary Chinese was very terse, leaving much to be understood from context, insertion of occasional verbs and grammatical markers helped to clarify the meaning.
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.