Ager,+Simon

Ager, Simon. "Ominglot Writing System and Languages of the World." //Japanese Kanji//. 1998. Web. 7 Sep. 2010. .

(All found on page 1)

1. "**//Japanese children are expected to know all of the jōyō kanji by the end of high//** **//school//** **//but to read specialist publications and ordinary literature, they need to know another two or three thousand kanji." (//** page 1) //** 2. “The word Kanji is **// **the Japanese version of the Chinese word** **//hànzì//, which means "Han characters".” (** page 1)

3. “Between 5,000 and 10,000 Chinese characters, or kanji are used in written Japanese.” ( page 1)

4. "When the Japanese adopted Chinese characters to write the Japanese language they also borrowed many Chinese words." ( page 1) //**5. "In 1981 in an effort to make it easier to read and write Japanese, the Japanese government introduced the jōyō kanji hyō (List of Chinese Characters for General Use), which includes 1,945 regular characters, plus 166 special characters used only for people's names**// **."** ( page 1)
 * 6. "There are also a number of characters, // kokuji //** **(national characters) which were invented in Japan."** ( page 1)


 * 7. "Some of the // kanji //** **have been simplified, although not always in the same way as characters have been simplified in China:"** ( page 1)

8. "Today about half the vocabulary of Japanese comes from Chinese and Japanese kanji are use to represent both Sino-Japanese words and native Japanese words with the same meaning. " ( page 1) 9. "Government documents, newspapers, textbooks and other publications for non-specialists use only these // kanji //. Writers of other material are free to use whichever // kanji // they want. " ( page 1) 10. "The general rule is that when a kanji appears on its own, it is given the // kun yomi //, but when two or more kanji appear together, they are given the // on yomi //." ( page 1) 11. "There are, of course, many exceptions to this rule. For example it is sometimes difficult to work out how to pronounce people's names because some of the kanji used for names have non-standard pronunciations." 12."Multiple //on yomi// are often a result of borrowing words over a period of many centuries, during which Chinese pronunciation changed, and also borrowing words from different varieties of Chinese." 13. "Before the 4th century AD, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. During the 4th century they began to import and adapt the Chinese script, along with many other aspects of Chinese culture, probably via Korea." (page 2) 14. "At first the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese or in a Japanese-Chinese hybrid style. An example of the hybrid style is the //kojiki// (Records of Antiquity) written in 712 AD. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as //man'yōgana//, literarly "Ten Thousand leaf syllabic script", which used the characters for their phonetic values." (page 2) 15. "Over time a writing system emerged in which Chinese characters were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings." (page 2) 16. "**Modern Japanese** is written with a mixture of [|hiragana] and [|katakana], plus [|kanji]. Modern Japanese texts may also include [|rōmaji], (Roman letters), the standard way of writing Japanese with the [|Latin] alphabet, //eimoji// (English script), non-Japanese words written in their own script and various symbols known as //kigō//." (page 2) 17. "There are also a number of characters, //kokuji// (national characters) which were invented in Japan." 18. "Some //kanji// have multiple //on yomi// and //kun yomi// (the first three readingsare //on yomi//, the last three are //kun yomi//):"