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.