Kanji - Chinese Characters

Japan has been borrowing Chinese characters called kanji as well as using the other two simpler writing systems: katakana and hiragana. Recent reports have been concerned about the loss of writing kanji because of the rise of technology, especially computers and mobile phones. What this means is that with technology all three writing Japanese systems are combined into one, so that users easily forget how to write kanji because it is just a press of the button away. I remember the mobile phone was especially convenient in changing hiragana into kanji without needing to recall what the character was. Judith Evans from the South China Morning Post says part of the reason why characters are difficult to enter into computers and mobile phones ‘…are innate to the character-based writing systems themselves’.

However recent iPhone applications have tried to bring the focus back on learning kanji, allowing users to draw characters onto the screen.