Portal:Ancient Japan/Selected article/3

Written Chinese comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated. It had a huge effect on the development of the written language of ancient Japan. Chinese characters are called kanji in Japanese. Kanji do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, each character generally represents either a complete one-syllable word (see logogram) or a single-syllable part of a word. Kanji themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects or abstract notions. Written Chinese is one of the world's oldest active, continuously used writing systems. Many current Chinese characters have been traced back to the Shang dynasty about 1200–1050 BC, but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier. After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC).

Kanji were first introduced into ancient Japan in the first half of the first millennium AD. At the time, Japanese had no native written system, and kanji were used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meanings, rather than similar pronunciations. A notable exception to this rule was the system of man'yōgana, which used a small set of Chinese characters to help indicate pronunciation. The man'yōgana later developed into the phonetic alphabets, hiragana and katakana.