Nina's Nihongo Zone 15 - Kuzushiji, or Cursive + (Patreon)

Hello patrons, and welcome to episode 15 of Nina's Nihongo Zone! This month, in honor of my recent Japanese-calligraphy exam, I talk kuzushiji - cursive Japanese writing. It's history and development, and the difficulty of learning to read it (or training computers to read it).

- Wikipedia pages for kanji, hentaigana, and Japanese script reform.

- Blog post introducing kuzushiji.

- Pages from the University of Kansas and University of Pennsylvania with resources for studying kuzushiji.

- Paper about KuLA - a mobile application for learning kuzushiji. They talk about kuzushiji, the difficulties of learning to read it, and the application's development. 

- The page for a 2019 contest to "Build a model to transcribe ancient Kuzushiji into contemporary Japanese characters." Good explanation of kuzushiji and the difficulties and special considerations of AI transcription.

- English-language landing page for Minna de Honkoku - "Let’s read historical documents in cooperation with friends and AIs!"

- Twitter account @tkasasagi - a Japanese literature PhD working on an app to transcribe kuzushiji text.

- A couple art accounts I like to follow on Twitter, both of which have many examples of kuzushiji: Masterpieces of Japan and Harvard Art Museum: Calligraphy Bot. 

- The intro song is "The city" by The Kyoto Connection, from the album Kyoto Soundscapes, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

- The outro song is "Brain Power" by Mela, from the album Mela two, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

If you have language questions or a topic you'd like to request for a future episode of Nina's Nihongo Zone, you can email me at gundampodcast@gmail.com, or leave a comment below!