Japanese calligraphers demonstrate how Japanese Hiragana evolved from Chinese characters.

Japanese calligrapher Suzuki Xiao Sheng shows how Hiragana evolved from Japanese characters.

These four kinds are written in block letters, running script, cursive script and Japanese respectively.

When Chinese characters were first introduced to Japan, the Japanese suddenly put each Chinese character on a Japanese pronunciation. When writing articles, all Chinese characters are used, and understanding is not based on the meaning of words, but on pronunciation. To put it bluntly, Chinese characters in that period were a kind of phonetic notation in Japan, just like we used English letters as pinyin.

Later, I became lazy. They feel too tired to write so many Chinese characters, and they need to hold them accurately to express their meaning. To put it bluntly, they feel that they need their own characters, so they decompose and simplify Chinese characters.

Therefore, katakana is changed by the radicals of Chinese characters, and hiragana is changed by the cursive script of Chinese characters. There is no problem at all.

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