Chapter 2 HIRAGANA
Historically, the Japanese language was first written in kanji, Chinese characters, when they were introduced to the country in around the 5^th century A.D. Those days kanji was used as phonetics to represent Japanese sounds. As each kanji represents a certain meaning as well as a sound, however, they were not the best option for expressing the Japanese sounds. (This is comparable to the fact that the Rosetta Stone was written in ideographs but they were used as phonetics because the language was completely different.)

Then, around the 8^th century a new set of phonetic symbols, called hiragana, was created by simplifying certain kanji which represented sounds which were similar to respective Japanese sounds. This was done by the court ladies who represented a learned class of the time.

Presently, for most of nouns, each of which represents an independent notion and does not have inflected forms, kanji are predominantly used. Also, for Adjectival and Verbal predicates, the core part (root) of the word is predominantly written in kanji, but their inflected parts are written in hiragana. Also, instrumental parts of the Japanese language, like sentence-particles, clause-particles and phrase-particles, are always written in hiragana. Hiragana is also used to indicate how to read kanji, as there can be a number of ways of reading the same kanji as you will later learn.

In sections 1-5 of this Chapter, you will learn most of the hiragana characters through reading all the phrases and sentences from Kihon Kaiwa (Basic Conversations) of Lesson 2 of SUN (Step Up Nihongo) textbook. The sections 6-9 will complete its entirety.