The Three Elements Of Japanese

When I was in kindergarten, my grandmother brought back a “Banbi” (translated as “Bambi”) picture book from Japan for me. I was always looking at the writing thinking how pretty it was. Later on I was again introduced to the Japanese culture through their mangas (Japanese comic books) as I decided to take up Japanese. However Japanese language is a very difficult language to learn. Its grammatical structure and pronunciations are very different from English. The three different written elements of Japanese, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji, each have a distinctive history, usage, and general appearance, making them the most difficult parts of the language to learn.

Hiragana’s general appearance and usage are easily defined while its history is the most interesting of the three elements. Hiragana evolved through the simplification of Chinese characters in the Heian period (794-1185) since the Japanese had no writing system at the time. It didn’t quite fit their language, so ...