Tonuao is a zonal auxlang intended to be quickly learnable, readily comprehensible, and mutually communicative between persons of the East Asian cultural sphere. It uses Chinese characters for much of its writing, with some forms being simplified according to the shinjitai (新字体) standards of Japan. The Japanese syllabary katakana is used for all other sounds. It is not tonal, mostly analytic, SVO, topic-prominent, uses classifiers, is pro-drop, copula-drop, and uses postpositions.