Manyogana
Due to the many differences that existed between Chinese and Japanese, the Chinese character system had to be changed to fit spoken Japanese, if it were to be understood by native Japanese speakers. The first solution the Japanese came up with was to use Chinese characters for their pronunciation and not for the meaning of the word. These were called man'yōgana, which was named after the Man'yōshu, a collection of Japanese poems that wrote Japanese using the man'yōgana. While Chinese characters used for their meaning became known as kanji, the Chinese characters being used only for pronunciation became known as man'yōgana. Man'yōgana consisted of roughly 970 Chinese characters that could be used to represent roughly the roughly 90 different morae used in the Japanese language.