Definition & Bedeutung von "hanja"

What is "hanja"?

Hanja refers to the Chinese characters used in the Korean writing system. Although modern Korean primarily uses Hangul, its native alphabet, hanja was once widely used for writing Korean. Hanja characters represent meanings rather than sounds and are mostly used for academic, historical, or formal texts, especially for disambiguation in situations where Korean words share the same pronunciation but have different meanings. While hanja is no longer a part of everyday writing, it remains an important tool for understanding classical literature, legal texts, and older Korean documents, as well as providing insight into the shared linguistic history between China and Korea.