Chinese Character, Han Character.

1. Origin

Chinese Character which is called Hanzi in China has been developed in continent of China.

2. Used by Asian countries

As People had moved from China to other countries, Chinese character has spreaded out to the countries.

So the countries used the Chinese character as their major alphabet.

Japanese called it Kanji and Korean called it Hanja. 

But it was not their own language as Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese are quite different from Chinese.

Anyway the most of countries in Asia didn't have their own character, so they had to use Chinese character.

3. Chinese Character does not have their sound.

Chinese Character had developed from picture. 

Because of that, Chinese character shows their meaning itself.

However Chinese character doesn't have their sound. Even Chinese people couldn't unify their pronounciation.

Therefore people who use Chinese character had difficulties of sounding and teaching.

The way of pronounciation among countries were quite different. 

For example, moon is /yuè/ in China, /wɔl/ in Korea, /getsu/ in Japan. 

That was very inconvenient. They had to teach themselves meaning, sound and related their own language from Chinese character.

They had to write their official documents in Chinese character but that was very diffrerent from their own language.

Therefore they made another alphabet system that can be able to write their own language.

However they could not ignore Chinese character, so they made them by just simplifying Chinese character.
 

Ancient Korean made extra alphabet system idoo by just simplifying Chinese character.

It mixed meaning and similar sound of Chinese character to present Korean language.

4. Japanese character Kana.

Japanese people wanted to have their extra alphabet system too. 

So they created Japanese alphabet Kana from Chinese character. 

The main creation rule was similar to Ancient Korean idoo.

It was very reasonable and efficient solution because people could not use if they just created whole new character system.

5. Korean Hangul

Korean new alphabet system Hangul was created by the great King Sejong in Chosun dynasty.

The King Sejong created the alphabet to teach poor and uneducated people.

They had no money and no political power to teach themselves, and Chinese character was too difficult to learn.

The most of character systems were not created by one person. They not created but developed by a number of people among thousands of years.

So the King Sejong created Hangul from Human oral shape.