How was hiragana established?

Long time ago in Japan we didn't have any kanji characters.
It is considered that it was around 500 A.D. that Chinese people introduced kanji to Japanese people.

However at that time, although men could use kanji, women were not allowed to use kanji.
Even though they wanted to send letters to their friends or someone they like, they were not able to do that because using kanji was prohibited.
So they thought about how they could send letters.


They decided to modify the kanji and create original characters from them.
It is speculated that the characters they used are the origins of hiragana.
Here are some examples how kanji changed into hiragana.







By the way, as you may know, there are 50 of hiragana but there used to be more.
Look at the pictures below. These are other versions of "か" and "の".




You can see these characters in Japanese old poetry "waka".
There are a lot more hiragana variations besides "か" and "の".
Depending on the preference or contexts, authors can choose proper characters for their poetries.

download the practice sheet

I prepared hiragana practice sheet.
If you are interested in practicing hiragana, please download them.

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