Reading old kanji

Here is a short video by Dr. Kasashima Tadayuki, the chief curator at the Idemitsu Museum of Art and specialist in Japanese calligraphy.  In the video, Dr. Kasashima explains the development of brushed style for two simple characters which were ultimately combined.  It suggests in some measure the difficulty of reading old cursive text.  BTW, though the site at Heidelberg University is largely in German, you'll find the video captioned in English. Thanks to Melanie Trede (Professor of Japanese History at Heidelberg U.) for sharing the video broadly.

http://www.materiale-textkulturen.de/audio_video.php