Learn Japanese - All About the Japanese Language

Background of the Japanese Language

Japanese is thought to be an isolated language or an Altaic language. It ranks in the list of the top ten languages based on number of native speakers, with around 130 million people speaking Japanese as their native language.
The Japanese language is rich with regional dialects, with some being so radically different from hyōjun-go (標準語) the "standard dialect" that some native speakers even have trouble understanding them. The most well-known dialect is Kansai-ben (関西弁) the "Kansai dialect," which is spoken throughout the Kansai region of Japan. The Kansai region refers to an area in western Japan that includes major cities Osaka and Kyoto.
The Japanese written katakana language consists of three alphabets: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are phonetic alphabets, with the latter being used primarily for writing foreign words. Kanji is a system of characters of Chinese origin used to represent various ideas.
As mentioned above, the Japanese language's writing system has borrowed heavily from that of the Chinese language. Although the number of borrowed Chinese characters is in the thousands, many of them have fallen out of use. The Japanese Ministry of Education has created a list of 1,945 jōyō kanji (忢梡娍帤) "common use kanji" made up of characters commonly used in everyday life. Japanese children will have studied all of these kanji by the time they graduate from junior high school.

About Japan

Japan is known as Nihon or Nippon (擔杮) to the Japanese, with the two characters meaning "sun" and "origin." This is why Japan is sometimes known as the "Land of the Rising Sun."

Where Japanese Is Spoken

Japanese is mainly spoken on the island of Japan, but there are large communities of Japanese speakers all over the world, including China, Korea, Australia, the United States, Canada, and many other regions.

Top Five Reasons to Learn Japanese

So why should you learn Japanese? Here are some of the top reasons!

#5. To communicate with Japanese people! Over 130 million people throughout the world speak Japanese, placing it in the top ten languages spoken in the world. Just imagine all of the conversations you could have!

#4. Japanese pronunciation is easy! Japanese is pronounced just the way it looks, so you can start speaking it right away.

#3. You will learn more than just a language. Learning Japanese will give you great insight into the world of Japanese culture you just can't get any other way. By learning how the language works, you'll learn more about how the culture works.

#2. Japanese is fun! Japan has a lot to offer in the way of pop culture-fun and interesting movies, music, TV shows, comics, games-you name it! Learning Japanese will give you even greater access to the rich world of Japanese pop culture.

#1. You can make money! Japan boasts the second largest economy in the world after the United States. Proficient speakers of Japanese can find jobs in various fields such as business, international relations, finance, electronics, information technology, tourism, translation, and much, much more.

The Writing System

The Japanese writing system uses two syllabic scripts, known separately as hiragana (傂傜偑側) and katakana (僇僞僇僫) and collectively as kana (偐側), and thousands of Chinese characters known as kanji (娍帤). Each script serves a different function. We use hiragana for grammatical elements and for words that do not use kanji (or for words where the author doesn't know the kanji). We most frequently use katakana to write borrowed words of foreign origin and onomatopoeic sound effects. Finally, we use kanji for words of both Japanese and Chinese origin as well as many Japanese names.

The earliest written form of Japanese was based on kanji. In this system, known as man'yogana, these kanji were used for their pronunciation rather than their meaning. Because this system was quite complicated, kana were invented as a way to simplify it. As a result, each hiragana and katakana character comes from a simplified version of a man'yogana kanji. If you look at some of these man'yogana kanji and their simplified kana equivalents side-by-side, it is easy to see how they came to be.

There are forty-six characters in the hiragana and katakana scripts, for a total of ninety-two characters in all. These characters represent sounds, specifically syllables. A syllable is generally made up of a consonant plus a vowel, though some are only a vowel. In Japanese, there are five vowels (a, i, u, e, and o) and fourteen basic consonants (k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, and p).

We use the hiragana syllabary for two types of words that do not use kanji: okurigana (憲傝壖柤), grammatical elements called "particles," which are inflected verb and adjective endings; and for furigana (傆傝偑側), small hiragana symbols placed above or to the side of a kanji character that indicate how it is read. While we most frequently use furigana to aid children and foreigners learning Japanese, we also use them when the reading for a kanji is particularly difficult or uncommon. Their curvy, flowing lines characterize hiragana symbols.

We use the katakana syllabary for gairaigo (奜棃岅), words of foreign origin, onomatopoeic words that indicate sounds, scientific names, and also for emphasis, much like how italics are used in English. Their angular, boxy lines characterize katakana symbols.

Kanji are Chinese characters that have been adapted into Japanese over many years. The characters were originally pictographs of people, animals, and other objects.

Kanji Reading "Meaning"
岥 kuchi "mouth"
嶳 yama "mountain"

As you can see in the table above, the character 岥, pronounced kuchi, means "mouth" and is a box shape that resembles an open mouth. Another example is the character 嶳, pronounced yama, which means "mountain" and indeed looks like the skeleton of a mountain. However, over the centuries, they have become increasingly stylized and most no longer resemble the things they represent. Kanji are made up of smaller parts known as radicals. Many characters have been combined with others to create new ones. When written on the page, each character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is. In written Japanese, there are no spaces between characters.

The number of kanji in existence number into the tens of thousands, but the good news is that a large number of these are rarely used variants, accumulated throughout history. The Japanese government has created a list of recommended characters known as jōyō kanji (忢梡娍帤), which currently contains 1,945 characters (as of 2009). As this list occasionally undergoes revisions, this number may increase in the future. Studies have shown that full literacy in the Japanese language requires knowledge of around two thousand characters.

Most kanji have at least two different kinds of readings: kunyomi (孭撉傒), which is the Japanese reading, and onyomi (壒撉傒), which is the original Chinese reading. We usually use the kunyomi when the kanji stands alone and the onyomi when the kanji is part of a compound. To give an example, we can read the kanji 悈 ("water") as either mizu (kunyomi) or sui (onyomi). However, there are exceptions to this rule you simply must remember.

Romaji (儘乕儅帤) is Japanese transliterated into the Roman alphabet. With romaji, one can read Japanese without any prior knowledge of the Japanese writing system. There are several systems of romaji, with the Hepburn system being the most widely used.

Basic Japanese Grammar

Welcome to our explanation of Basic Japanese Grammar! Now, we know the mere mention of grammar is enough to make your palms sweat and perhaps bring back some not-so-good memories of your old high school language classes. But don't worry-we're here to give you a basic overview of Japanese grammar using language that's easy to understand-no drawn-out, long-winded explanations here! Learn Japanese grammar quickly while having fun at the same time!

Before we take a look at Japanese grammar, let's quickly review the basics of English grammar. By understanding more about how English grammar works, you'll be able to see how it differs from Japanese grammar.

First, let's take a look at sentence order.

English is what we call an SVO language, which means the sentences come in the order of subject-verb-object. Let's illustrate this with an example.

English Sentence Order

Subject
Verb
Object

I
eat
fruit

The subject, or the thing taking the action, is "I." The verb, or action, is "eat." The object, or the thing receiving the action, is "fruit." This is an example of a sentence in an SVO language.

Japanese is a bit different from English in this respect. Japanese is what's called an SOV language. This means the subject comes first, followed by the object, and then the verb. That's right, the verb comes last. So our previous example, "I eat fruit" in English, becomes "I fruit eat" when put in Japanese SOV order.

Japanese Sentence Order

Subject
Object
Verb

I
fruit
eat

This is one of the biggest differences between English and Japanese grammar and one of the most important aspects to keep in mind!

Characteristics of the Japanese Language

Now let's compare some characteristics of the Japanese language with the English language. First, we'll talk about features that are much simpler than their English counterparts are.

Tense

Let's start with tense. Tense is a method we use in English to refer to time-past, present, and future. If you are a native English speaker, you might not even be aware of how many tenses there are in English. Let's think about the future tense for a moment. The sentence "I jog" in the present tense becomes "I will jog" or even "I'm going to jog." (And they have slightly different meanings! Did you notice?)

Japanese, on the other hand, only has two tenses: past and non-past. It's called non-past because Japanese uses the same tense for the present and future. How does this work? Let's take a look! Here's an example of our sentence in the present tense.

(僗乕僷乕偵峴偒傑偡丅)
Sūpā ni ikimasu.
"I go to the supermarket."

So how do we change this to the future? Simple! We just add a word that indicates the action will occur sometime in the future:

[(柧擔/棃廡) 僗乕僷乕偵峴偒傑偡丅]
Ashita/raishuu Sūpā ni ikimasu.
"I will go to the supermarket tomorrow/next week."

There you have it! By adding a word like "tomorrow" or "next week" that indicates some point in the future, we've turned our present tense into future tense without even changing the verb.

Conjugation

English is full of irregular verbs. In many cases, we can turn present tense verbs into past tense by adding the suffix -ed to the end, but think of how many exceptions there are to this rule: "fly" becomes "flew," "run" becomes "ran," "buy" becomes "bought"...the list goes on! If you've ever studied a Romance language, then you know how common exceptions are when it comes to conjugating verbs. In contrast, Japanese only has two-count them-two verbs that conjugate irregularly. The rest follow the same patterns, so they're easy to get the hang of! Japanese verbs are divided up into three different groups according to how they conjugate, which we will refer to as Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 later on.

English and many other languages also conjugate verbs according to who's taking the action: for example, "I go" vs. "he goes." When you get into Romance languages, this system gets even more complex. However, in Japanese, it doesn't matter who is doing the action - the verb will not change! Let's look at a few examples so we can really appreciate this advantage of Japanese. First, note that the verb "to go" is ikimasu. The other words in red are "I", "him", and "you", respectively.

巹偼妛峑偵峴偒傑偡丅
Watashi wa gakkō ni ikimasu.
"I go to school."
斵偼妛峑偵峴偒傑偡丅
Kare wa gakko ni ikimasu.
"He goes to school."
偁側偨払偼妛峑偵峴偒傑偡丅
Anata-tachi wa gakko ni ikimasu.
"You (pl.) go to school."

Take a look at ikimasu! It doesn't change! Who is doing the action has no effect on the following verb. Great, isn't it?

Singulars and Plurals

Remember learning all of the complicated rules for forming plurals in English when you were in grade school? We first learned that you add the suffix -s to a word to make it plural, but then came one exception after another, such as words like knives, candies, and mice. Well now, think about this: Japanese words almost never change to reflect plurals. Nezumi, the word for "mouse," could refer to one mouse or ten mice! What a big change from having two very different words to differentiate between singular and plural.

Forming Questions

Think for a moment about how you form questions in English. You have to change the order of the sentence. Here's an example:

"He is a student" becomes "Is he a student?"

In Japanese, it's extremely easy to create questions. By simply putting ka at the end of a sentence, you can turn it into a question! Let's take a look at the Japanese equivalent of the sentence above:

斵偼妛惗偱偡丅仺斵偼妛惗偱偡偐丠
(Kare wa gakusei desu.) 仺 (Kare wa gakusei desu ka?)
"He is a student." 仺 "Is he a student?"

Let's look at one more:

偁側偨偼搶嫗偵廧傫偱偄傑偡丅仺偁側偨偼搶嫗偵廧傫偱偄傑偡偐丅
(Anata wa Tōkyō ni sunde imasu.) 仺 (Anata wa Tōkyō ni sunde imasu ka?)
"You live in Tokyo." 仺 "Do you live in Tokyo?"

Okay, now let's take a look at some characteristics unique to the Japanese language that may not have any equivalent in English.

Formal and Informal Speech

In English, we can use certain words and phrases to make our speech sound more polite to others. Japanese uses entirely different grammar structures when it comes to polite speech. There are three politeness levels in spoken Japanese: informal, formal, and honorific.

Gender
By gender, we do not mean feminine and masculine words that show up in many of the romance languages. By gender, we mean that female speakers will use different words and phrases than men, and that there are some exclusively masculine words. In Japanese, it is very possible to look at written dialogue and guess whether the speaker is male or female without any verbal cues.

Counters
Japanese has a long list of counters, or words that we use to count specific items. The corresponding counter depends on the appearance or makeup of the item. For example, there are different counters for sheets of paper and bottles because they differ in shape. While English does contain some counters (think "loaf of bread" or "bottle of wine"), the range of counters in Japanese is much more extensive.

Omission
In English, we almost always need to state the subject in our sentences: "Yesterday I went shopping at the mall, and then I went to Starbucks where I had a latte." Note that we need to state "I" for every action.

In Japanese, the writer often omits the subject from the sentence when it's understood who is doing the action. In fact, stating the subject every time will actually make your Japanese sound unnatural. The key is to only state the subject when it's absolutely necessary. In this way, Japanese lets you get straight to the important part of your sentence!

That wasn't so bad, was it? We hope this overview has given you a good idea of some of the most unique characteristics of Japanese. Keeping these in mind will give you an idea of what to look out for and will prepare you as you dive further into the world of Japanese grammar!

Basic Japanese Pronunciation

It's often said that Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest aspects of the language. And guess what-it's true! But it still takes some practice, and we're here to help you with it. We'll introduce you to the ins and outs of Japanese pronunciation and show you how it differs from English pronunciation.

Sounds and Syllables
Let's first take a look at how Japanese sounds work. Compared with other languages, Japanese has a relatively small set of sounds, with only fourteen consonants (k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, and p) and five vowels (a, e, i, o, and u). In Japanese, there are no such words as the English word "strength," which has clusters of three or more consonants. Japanese is made up of syllables, which are made up of a consonant and a vowel. The only exceptions are the vowels and the n sound, which stands alone.

Stress
Let's think about stress in English for a moment. Try saying the words "important" and "interesting" aloud. When you say these words aloud, you're putting emphasis, or stress, on a certain syllable. In "important," the stress is on the "port" syllable. In "interesting," the stress is on the "int" syllable. If you haven't studied phonetics before, it's probably something that just comes naturally that you've never noticed! Because correct English pronunciation emphasizes certain syllables, English is known as a stress language.

Japanese, on the other hand, doesn't have stress! It's a stress-free language! (Until you start learning kanji, perhaps...) In Japanese, each syllable is held the same length of time and given equal stress. Stressing only certain syllables will sound unnatural, so keep this in mind when pronouncing Japanese.

Let's take a look at a word in Japanese and compare how it is pronounced in Japanese and English. Let's take the word teriyaki, a cooking technique where meat is marinated.

English pronunciation: [ ter-uh-YAH-kee ] Note how the third syllable is stressed.
Japanese pronunciation: [teh-rah-yah-kee ] In Japanese, each syllable receives the same amount of stress.

This might sound like a lot to consider, but remember that learning good pronunciation is one of the easier aspects of learning the Japanese language!