Nahhh, get outta here!

Na. Or rather な. I just had a mini revelation about something that is probably common knowledge amongst those with basic Japanese. If you take away the squiggly bottom right hand side from hiragana*, な (na), you get katakana** ナ (na). I mean, duhh!! I have noticed other relationships betwen hiragana and their katakana counterparts, but am surprised I didn't catch this one earlier on. Ha!

*hiragana is the normal Japanese phonetic script
**katakana is the phonetic script used for borrow words (and sometimes for other purposes such as for animal names)

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BONUS
I'll keep this blog content light, so I will end by mentioning that upon further (2 minute) research, I learnt that the hiragana are indeed, derived from chinese characters. Interesting!! There is a nifty chart showing a 3 step evolution from chinese characters to hiragana  found in the hiragana entry over at Wikipedia.