Yeah, anyone who has ever seen the calligraphy hanging on the walls of a first grade classroom knows the kids are not achieving excellence yet. No one expects it either, so it’s strange to say that they’re starting at “the most elaborate stage.”
That just isn’t true. The courses especially for pre schoolers are intended to give them a beautiful handwriting and they advertise them like: The 書初め of kids who went through this course are often chosen for the school exhibition and things like that.
I thought the discussion was of what kids are generally taught, not kids specifically seeking out extra calligraphy lessons.
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I’m skeptical. The fact that these courses have to be advertised makes it sound like this is not actually part of standard education.
I mean it is strange to use Hiragana for kids because obviously they have been derived from Calligraphy.
Or maybe I didn’t get the meaning of the video?
They could as well start with Katakana, something like in my country, kids start with printed letters and later they switch to a connected handwriting style.
Of course it is not standard to teach a 4 year old to write, however, the question still is, why Japan as a culture made the decision at some point to use Hiragana to start in primary school and not Katakana.
Because if you’re writing with only kana it’s standard to use hiragana. If katakana was the standard “no kanji” set, they’d start with that. Either way, they learn them basically back to back, so there is not a long gap of time where they only know hiragana and not katakana.
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Because hiragana’s arguably the most useful of the three systems and when you don’t know how to write something in kanji you write it in hiragana? Not to mention stuff that’s normally written in hiragana anyway.
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And also 木曽谷 in Nagano Prefecture.
Plus, it’s already present in WaniKani as the “mask” radical.
They use hiragana for kids because hiragana is what they’re going to use basically all the time. I don’t need to know whether the alphabet comes from Greek characters or Norse runes in order to be able to teach it to English kids - it’s just the alphabet. Same deal with hiragana.
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I understand now where Hiragana is coming from (Calligraphy), and as far as I know it was used by women in the beginning because they where not supposed to have the same level of education like men.
But I am interested in why this Calligraphy style Mora writing system and not Katakana (another Mora writing system) became to be used all the time.
Until like 100 years ago, katakana was used for okurigana and particles, so for most of the history of written Japanese, katakana was arguably “more useful” than hiragana if one was also incorporating kanji into the text. Hiragana was still the standard way to write words that don’t use kanji and aren’t okurigana or particles.
As for what prompted the decision to use hiragana for okurigana and particles, I’m not really sure.
But in any case, most Japanese people do not think of hiragana as “cursive” or calligraphy. The origins of it as abbreviations of kanji in flowing style is basically trivia at this point.
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That’s interesting, I didn’t know that.
Maybe it is trivia, but sometimes it is worth to question also trivia.
Eg until now I was always wondering why the か (in handwriting, the font that is used here seems to be different) has the 力 part squeezed in the left half of the square and the dash covering the whole right part.
But since I know it comes from 加 suddenly that makes sense.
Went to look up the history of hiragana and katakana - main thing I learned is that Leebo is everywhere
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Before and up to the end of WW2, okurigana was written in katakana for formal documents, and in hiragana for non-formal documents. After WW2, the kanji+katakana variant came to be associated with the previous government and its military; and there was a big debate about whether the Japanese language would even survive, and if it does survive, how it would be written. Should Japanese switch to romaji, almost like the Vietnamese language?
After these discussions, and with participation of Allied nations (the occupation force), the Japanese government decides to formalise many things, including simplifications of many kanji and also the use of hiragana for okurigana. A lot of it is psychological, to turn a new leaf in Japanese history and dissociate themselves from their war-waging past.
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Something similar happened in Germany and Austria after the war.
And (I am prepared for the shitstorm) I always thought that Kanjis/ Katakana mixed with Hiragana looks unbalanced. It feels like mixing two typeface families that don’t work well together and now I know why it feels like that.
This feeling of unbalance does not occur in a Calligraphic text though, also makes sense now somehow.
In 1946, there was even a Japanese writer named Naoya Shiga (at that time considered by many to be one of the best writers in Japan) who suggested that Japan should leave the Japanese language and embrace French (フランス語). Plot twist: he did not speak French himself 
This is probably comparable to Ernest Hemingway suggesting the US switch to Mongolian language or something.
This is mentioned in his Japanese Wikipedia article, but not in the English one:
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Weird!
Thank you for posting the Wikipedia entry. Isn’t it imbalanced to mix Kanji and Hiragana? Is this just my perception?
Huh?
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Quite. If that’s how you feel, @anon43113135, studying Chinese instead might be simpler than suggesting Japanese undergo a major orthographic overhaul.
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What even is the suggestion? No kanji? No hiragana? Both sound awful.