Nôm
Nôm includes thousands of characters not found in Chinese. In contrast, Japan developed only a few hundred kokuji, Korea just a handful of rarely used gukja. These characters were created by authors who combined pre-existing elements. One element, called the semantic component, indicates the character's meaning, either pictographically or ideographically. The other element, called the phonetic component, gives pronunciation. For example, the reading ba is indicated by the character . In Mandarin, this character has the same pronunciation as in Vietnamese, but it's meaning is unrelated: "to long for." For the character  (⿺巴三), the character 三 which means "three" is added as the semanic component. "Father" is also ba, but written as  (⿱父巴). "Turtle" is con ba ba (; ⿰虫巴). Most Chinese characters were created by the same method. As the correspondence between sound and meaning is compounded in Vietnamese created characters than it is in Chinese characters, the same approach resulted in two distinctions between Nôm characters; chữ Nôm (字喃; native characters) and Hán Nôm (漢喃; Han characters).