Do Chinese, Koreans and Japanese use the same writing system?
While the three languages spoken in mainland China, the Korean penninsula and Japan are very different, for historical reasons both the Japanese, and, to a much lesser degree, Korean language are still using Chinese characters today to write down the meanings of words. In ancient times, China was the dominating civilization in Asia, influencing the whole region with its sophisticated culture and amazing technical and scientific progress – including its writing system. In Japan, which previously did not have any way to write down words and preserve them for posterity, the Chinese characters were introduced around the 6th century AC. Together with the characters, the Chinese words represented by these characters were “imported” too. However, as Japanese has a set of sounds very different from the Chinese one, these “Sino-Japanese” readings only remotely resemble the original Chinese words (e.g., compare the readings for the two characters meaning “China”: “zhong1 guo2” and “chuu goku”).
