A similar system in use in Japan at about the same time, known as man'yogana, eventually evolved into hiragana, one of the syllabaries used to write modern Japanese. |
I've pretty much done the hiragana and katakana sections now, which was a major stumbling block. |
There is also two sets of Japanese syllabary: hiragana and katakana, that have only pronunciation and no particular meaning. |
In modern written Japanese, kanji, hiragana, and katakana are combined. |
A practical reason is that text full of minimally simple hiragana strokes looks like a carpet pattern, hard to read quickly. |
Each kana, as these two systems are called, is a separate phonetic syllabary and each hiragana character has a corresponding katakana character. |