Kanji

Kanji (, literally "Han characters") are Chinese characters used in Japanese. Kanji are one of the five character sets used in the modern Japanese writing system, the other four being hiragana, katakana, the Roman alphabet (r?maji), and Arabic numerals.

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This article focuses on the Japanese use of these characters; see Chinese character for a general discussion of Chinese characters, which are also used in several other languages.

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There is some disagreement about how the use of Chinese characters began in Japan, but it is generally accepted that Buddhist monks brought Chinese texts back to Japan in about the 5th century. These texts were in the Chinese language and would have been read as such at first. Over time, however, a system known as kanbun (??) emerged; it essentially used Chinese text with diacritical marks to allow Japanese speakers to read it in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar.

Han: Han can refer to:...

Chinese character: Chinese characters or Han characters (??/??) are logograms used in the written forms of the Chinese language, and to varying degrees in the Japanese and Korean languages (though the latter only in South Korea). Use of Chinese characters has disappeared from the Vietnamese language ? in which they w...

Japanese: When used as an adjective, Japanese refers to anything that originates from Japan. It may refer to more than one article:...