Japanese kanji symbols

For centuries Japanese and Korean wrote the Japanese and Korean languages with Chinese characters only. Later Korea developed its own writing system.

In the 9th century Japan japanized itself and created two syllabic systems called kana, which were based on abbreviated Chinese characters. The katakana and hiragana alphabets have a limited amount of syllables; therefore, memorizing them is not such a daunting task.

To this day the three writing systems, kanji or Chinese characters, katakana and hiragana coexist in the modern Japanese language. Rather the three have converged into the Japanese writing system.

From the 12th century Japan produced extraordinary calligraphers. They continued brushing their astounding calligraphies using Japanese kanji symbols or Chinese characters.

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© Núria Roig