in 1956, the government of the people's republic of china made public a set of simplified chinese characters to make learning, reading and writing the chinese language easier. in mainland china and singapore, people use these simpler characters. in hong kong, taiwan and other places where they speak chinese, people still use the more traditional characters. the korean language also uses chinese characters to represent certain words. the japanese language uses them even more often. these characters are known in korean as hanja and in japanese as kanji.