Like Chinese, Japanese also does not use spacing in its writing. Even though Japanese also uses many Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) in its writing, the two languages are actually very different from each other. When Japanese was first written, it was written entirely in kanji and man'yogana (kanji used only for writing the sounds of Japanese). Chinese characters could be used to either tell a words' pronunciation or its meaning, so it made Japanese very hard to read. Even native Japanese speakers had a hard time reading ancient Japanese writings.