Book excerpt: This A4 sized Japanese Writing Notebook is prefect for practicing your Japanese handwriting of the syllabaries Hiragana, katakana, Kana and Kanji characters. The notebook starts with two simple hiragana and katakana alphabet charts for guidance and help with practice. Please note this is not a textbook. Size: A4 ( 8.27 × 11.69 Inches) , 88 Pages. Cover: Matte / Print Interior: Two simple hiragana and katakana alphabet charts Interior: Alternate lined pages and specially designed Genkoyoshi/Grid lined paper. Interior: The book contains a mixture of alternate lined pages and specially designed Genkoyoshi paper. Genkoyoshi has columns of squares to write or practice your hiragana, kanji, kana or katakana handwriting. Each large square can hold one Japanese character and is divided into four quadrants to guide the correct positioning of the elements of the character. All the lines in this book are in dark grey, instead of pure black, so the lines are less distracting when you take notes and when you re-read them later. The lined sheets will come in handy for writing study notes. This book is a great tool for anyone learning cursive writing or looking to improve their handwriting. The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements, and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is often considered to be one of the most complicated in use anywhere in the world.