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Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters (''hanzi''). More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation. ''Hanja-mal'' or ''hanja-eo'' refers to words that can be written with hanja, and ''hanmun'' (, ) refers to Classical Chinese writing, although "hanja" is sometimes used loosely to encompass these other concepts. Because hanja never underwent major reform, they are almost entirely identical to traditional Chinese and ''kyūjitai'' characters. Only a small number of hanja characters are modified or unique to Korean. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in Japan and Mainland China have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding hanja characters. Although a phonetic Korean alphabet, now known as hangul, had been created by a team of scholars commissioned in the 1440s by King Sejong the Great, it did not come into widespread use until the late 19th and early 20th century. Thus, until that time it was necessary to be fluent in reading and writing hanja in order to be literate in Korean, as the vast majority of Korean literature and most other Korean documents were written in hanja. Today, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts (up to about the 1990s), or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities. Learning a certain number of hanja is very helpful to understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, and to enlarging one's Korean vocabulary. Hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—''hanja-eo'' (한자어, 漢字語)—are written with the hangul alphabet most of the time. ==History== A major motivation for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism. The major Chinese text that introduced hanja to Koreans, however, was not a religious text but the Chinese text, ''Cheonjamun'' (''Thousand Character Classic''). Koreans had to learn Classical Chinese to be properly literate for the most part, but there were some systems developed to use simplified forms of Chinese characters that phonetically transcribe Korean, namely, hyangchal (향찰; ), gugyeol (구결; ), and idu (이두; ). One way of adapting hanja to write Korean in such systems (such as Gugyeol) was to represent native Korean grammatical particles and other words solely according to their pronunciation. For example, Gugyeol uses the characters to transcribe the Korean word "hăni", in modern Korean, that means "does, and so". However, in Chinese, the same characters are read as the expression "wéi ní", meaning "becoming a nun." This is a typical example of Gugyeol words where the radical () is read in Korean for its meaning (hă—"to do") and the suffix , ni (meaning "nun"), used phonetically. Hanja was the sole means of writing Korean until King Sejong the Great promoted the invention of hangul in the 15th century. However, even after the invention of hangul, most Korean scholars continued to write in hanmun. It was not until the 20th century that hangul truly replaced hanja. Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949 (additionally, all texts are now written horizontally instead of vertically). Additionally, many words borrowed from Chinese have been replaced in the North with native Korean words. However, there are a large number of Chinese-borrowed words in widespread usage in the North (although written in hangul), and hanja characters still appear in special contexts, such as recent North Korean dictionaries.〔(【引用サイトリンク】New Korean-English Dictionary published )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「hanja」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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