Sino-Vietnamese characters
Nôm includes thousands of characters not found in Chinese. In contrast, Japan developed only a few hundred kokuji, most of them describing plants and animals found only in Japan. Korea had just a small number of rarely used gukja. These characters were created by writers who combined pre-existing elements. One element, called the radical, indicates the character's meaning, or at least a semantic category. The other element, called the remainder, gives pronunciation. This is similar to how most Chinese characters are written. Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language. In contrast, Japanese and Korean can be written in phonetic scripts that do not indicate tone.