Whenever you just start out learning Japanese, hiragana is usually the first writing system you learn. This led to the clear establishment of rules for the Japanese system in 1946. In 1900 the two kana scripts, hiragana, and katakana were codified. Do take note that one sound can have more than one hiragana. Hiragana is said to be cursive while katakana is more angular. However, some can be dissimilar, such as あ and ア. In some cases, the Hiragana and Katakana are created from different ideograms.Īmong Hi ragana and Katakana, some express the same sound and have similar shapes, such as り and リ. On the other hand, katakana is taken from a single element of a kanji. Hiragana can be considered a simplified calligraphy form of the kanji’s strokes. This change is thought to have taken place between the eighth and ninth centuries. On the left is the manyogana, and on the right are simplified hiragana and katakana forms. According to historians, the change was initiated by Buddhist priests who thought kanji was unable to accurately represent the Japanese language, and that a phonetic alphabet would be better. They are called syllabograms, as each character corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language. They take longer to write, as we are sure you have noticed by now! Due to their difficulty, those ideograms were slowly simplified into kana alphabets, namely hiragana and katakana. However, kanji’s characters are composed of many strokes. At that time, the ideograms were called manyogana (万葉仮名). They only used the phonetic reading of the kanji, regardless of their meaning. Around the fifth century, they started using kanji, ideograms that were adopted from China and Korea. Don’t forget to check out our Hiragana & Katakana chart and quiz for a more detailed guide and resource recommendation.ĭo you know about the history and the origin of hiragana and katakana? Originally, the Japanese ancestors did not have a writing system. We’ve covered smaller articles for each Japanese writing system.
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