In the eighth century during the Nara period, the Japanese developed two phonetic writing systems, or syllabaries, of their own to represent particles and grammatical endings not easily expressed with ideograms: katakana, based on the left-hand side of various Chinese characters, and hiragana, based on their shorthand form.
到了西元八世紀的奈良時代，日本才發展出與漢字不大一樣的文字系統，也就是取漢字偏旁及漢字草書而成的「平假名」及「片假名」，漸漸替代漢字，成為日文主流。