Japanese Language

Japanese (日本語 nihongo) is spoken in Japan, and essentially nowhere else. The language is distinct from Chinese and Korean, although the written form uses Chinese (kanji) characters, and is not known to be related to any other language. GrammarJapanese generally employs a subject-object-verb order, using particles to mark the grammatical functions of the words: 私がハンバーガーを食べる watashi-ga hamburger-o taberu, “I-subject hamburger-object eat”. It is common to omit subjects and even objects if these are clear from previous context. Verbs and adjectives conjugate by tense and politeness level, but not by person or number. There is no verb “to be” as such, but the polite copula desu can be used in most cases: John desu (“I am John”), Ringo desu (“This is an apple”), Akai desu (“It is red”), etc. Note that the exact meaning will depend on the implied subject! The good news is that Japanese has none of the following: gender, declensions or plurals. Nouns never conjugate and almost all verbs are regular. Reading and writingReading and writing Japanese are advanced skills which take years of work to gain much real proficiency. Japanese themselves use three different writing systems of various complexity, two of which (hiragana’ and katakana) are syllabic and relatively easy to learn with 50 characters each, but the clincher is the set of over 2000 Chinese characters known as kanji. The set of hiragana characters is illustrated in the Japanese Pronunciation Guide. (Article from/based on Wikitravel article and may be copied freely) | |