A report on Kanji and Chinese characters

The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.

The Japanese writing system combines Chinese characters, known as kanji (漢字), with two unique syllabaries (or moraic scripts) derived by the Japanese from the more complex Chinese characters: hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名, 'simple characters') and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名, 'partial characters').

As in other texts from this period, the Old Japanese sections are written in Man'yōgana, which uses kanji for their phonetic as well as semantic values.

However, the non-phonetic Chinese writing system causes a unique situation where the modern pronunciation of the classical language is far more divergent (and heterogeneous, depending on the native – not necessarily Chinese – tongue of the reader) than in analogous cases, complicating understanding and study of Classical Chinese further compared to other classical languages.

For example, Japanese speakers use On'yomi pronunciation when reading the kanji of words of Chinese origin such as 銀行 (ginkō) or the name for the city of Tōkyō (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 the name for the city of Ōsaka (大阪), and a system that aids Japanese speakers with Classical Chinese word order.

Chinese characters (pronounced hanzi in Mandarin, kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean and Hán tự in Vietnamese) are generally logograms, as are many hieroglyphic and cuneiform characters.

Katakana (片仮名、カタカナ) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji).

It functioned as a phonetic guide for Chinese characters, much like furigana in Japanese or Zhùyīn fúhào in Chinese.

The name for Japan in Japanese is written using the kanji 日本 and is pronounced or.

Japanese writing uses kanji (Chinese characters) and two sets of kana (syllabaries based on cursive script and radicals used by kanji), as well as the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals.

They include logosyllabic systems such as the Chinese script itself (or hanzi, now in two forms, traditional and simplified), and adaptations to other languages, such as Kanji (Japanese), Hanja (Korean), Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm (Vietnamese) and Sawndip (Zhuang).

Oracle bone script was the ancestor of modern Chinese characters engraved on oracle bones—animal bones or turtle plastrons used in pyromantic divination—in the late 2nd millennium BC, and is the earliest known form of Chinese writing.

It is also the direct ancestor of over a dozen East Asian writing systems developed over the next three millennia, including the Chinese and Japanese logographic and syllabaric scripts still in current use.

It uses Chinese characters (Chữ Hán) to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented by new characters created using a variety of methods, including phono-semantic compounds.

The first two categories are similar to the on and kun readings of Japanese kanji respectively.

Japanese names are usually written in kanji, which are characters that are Chinese in origin but Japanese in pronunciation.

These kanji resemble Chinese characters but originate in Japan and do not have widely known Chinese pronunciations.