Differences in simplification between China and Japan China and Japan simplified their writing systems independently from each other. After
World War II, their relations were hostile, so they did not cooperate.
Traditional Chinese characters are still officially used in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Korea (
Hanja supplemented
Hangul, but are now mainly historical), and by many
overseas Chinese. In Chinese, many more characters were simplified than in Japanese; some characters were simplified in only one language; other characters were simplified in the same way in both languages, and other characters were simplified in both languages but in different ways. This means that those who want to learn the writing systems of both languages must sometimes learn at least three different variations of one character: traditional Chinese,
simplified Chinese, and modern Japanese (for example ). Some others have more variations, such as (), some of which are considered the older forms of Chinese characters and variations of different Chinese regions, and the older forms of Japanese characters ().
Traditional characters that may cause problems displaying Note that within the kanji, there are 26 characters; the old forms of which may cause problems displaying: • Grade 2 (2 kanji): • Grade 3 (8 kanji): • Grade 4 (6 kanji): • Grade 5 (1 kanji): • Grade 6 (9 kanji): • Within the kanji, the same is true for 36 secondary-school kanji, so, in total, 62 of the 2,136 kanji have traditional forms that may cause problems displaying. These characters are Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs for which the old form () and the new form () have been unified under the Unicode standard. Although the old and new forms are distinguished under the
JIS X 0213 standard, the old forms map to Unicode CJK Compatibility Ideographs which are considered by Unicode to be canonically equivalent to the new forms and may not be distinguished by user agents. Therefore, depending on the user environment, it may not be possible to see the distinction between old and new forms of the characters. In particular, all Unicode normalization methods merge the old characters with the new ones.
List of simplified kanji For example, is the simplified form of . Note that is used to simplify three different traditional characters (, , and ). • • ==The kanji and their Chinese equivalents==