Why do Japanese use Chinese characters?

Since the 5th century AD, when China's ancient culture was introduced, Japanese people began to express their thoughts by using Chinese characters (Chinese character "かんじ"), and later they developed from Chinese characters to syllabic characters (pseudonyms). This is also the origin of using Chinese characters in Japanese. Pseudonyms are Japanese letters. Japanese pseudonyms evolved after Chinese characters were introduced into Japan, and the meanings of Chinese characters were replaced by their pictophonetic sounds. For example, the Japanese pen name "も" evolved from the Chinese character "Mao"; The Japanese pen name "ぃ" evolved from the cursive Chinese character "Yi".

These pseudonyms are borrowed from Chinese characters, and their meanings have been abandoned. They are a false usage, so they are called "pseudonyms". In Japanese, each pseudonym represents a syllable. Pseudonyms include unvoiced, voiced, semi-voiced and dial tone. In addition, there are syllables composed of two or three pseudonyms, namely, long sound, hurried sound and difficult sound.

Each pseudonym has two fonts, Hiragana and Katakana. Hiragana is generally used for writing and printing. Katakana is only used to record loanwords (words imported from other countries except China) and some special words. So now we use a orthographic calligraphy that uses ideographic Chinese characters and phonetic pseudonyms alternately. However, this orthographic calligraphy is too complicated and has become an important factor hindering the internationalization of Japanese.

Due to the great influence of China culture, more than 60% of Japanese words are borrowed from Chinese. According to statistics, there are about 2,400 Chinese characters in common use in Japan, which is 1000 fewer than China's Kangxi Dictionary.