Message from ablackwelder

[Anonymous]

In my first weeks teaching first-year students, I have already discussed how hiragana (one of the two main Japanese alphabets) was derived from borrowed Chinese characters, and how women were the first to learn and use kana, not kanji. Men, on the other hand, used kanji phonetically to construct poetry. Students were interested, and it gave them a little Japanese history as well. The pattern of Japanese civilization borrowing and revising (as opposed to copying) aspects of culture and technology from other civilizations is a theme I hope to revisit throughout the year, specifically with my fourth-year students.