When was kanji invented

These similarities in vocabulary that appear in Chinese and Japanese appear in Korean as well because before Korea had its own writing system, people also used kanji. So the same thing that happened in Japan, happened in Korea : vocabulary was imported.

To think it all started with cracked turtle shells. Kanji was a big revolution in the history of Asia and is a pain to learn, but you gotta admit, it looks pretty cool. Today, kanji is a huge part of the everyday life of Japanese people who spend years learning them in school. Thanks to kanji, we can be grateful that we only need 26 characters to read English! Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email. Skip to content What is kanji exactly? The birth of kanji. Evolution of kanji. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.

Loading Comments For example, the combination of "electricity" with "car" means "train". There are tens of thousands of characters, of which to are required to understand newspapers. A set of characters has been officially declared as the "kanji for everyday use". Before the introduction of Chinese characters, no Japanese writing system existed.

When adopting the characters, the Japanese did not only introduce the characters' original Chinese pronunciations, but also associated them with the corresponding, native Japanese words and their pronunciations. Consequently, most kanji can still be pronounced in at least two ways, a Chinese on-yomi and a Japanese kun-yomi way, which considerably further complicates the study of the Japanese language.

A lot of people, including myself in the early days, believe that Japanese came from Chinese. It seems to make sense if you look at the writing of the two languages. They are two major languages that use a similar writing system, so one could conclude that they are related. However, Japanese is not like Chinese at all. They do share a writing system though.

And Japanese has a lot of loan words from Chinese that came over with that system. In general, Chinese loan words seem a little more formal than native Japanese words. They are used more often in written Japanese. However, some writing will use hiragana in place of some words normally written in kanji if there are too many kanji in the writing. This keeps the whole piece from getting too stuffy.

All of these loan words is one reason why Chinese students have traditionally done a lot better on the JLPT. This also includes the exclusion of English katakana words as well.

The reading passages have become less about just knowing the vocabulary, but more about understanding ambiguities at the higher levels. The N4 and N5 reading sections still focus on vocabulary and grammar use though. Do you think the 3 writing systems used in Japanese are helpful or a pain?

Let me know in the comments. Hi Pls let me know the best site or app for Japanese conversation. I need help in this field. I have no time to participate at any class Thanks.