Japanese language

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Japanese calligraphy (beautiful writing). It says Nihongo, which means "Japanese."

Japanese (日本語 "Nihon-go" or "Nippon-go" in Japanese) is the language spoken on the island nation of Japan, in East Asia. A theory about its origin is that Japanese, Mongolian, and Turkish come from the same family of Altaic languages.

Japanese is a synthetic, agglutinative language. That means that a Japanese word has a stem called "body", and a lot of additional parts (called "suffix") to define the meaning of the word. By changing the suffix you can change the meaning of the word.

Japanese has only five vowel sounds. They are ah, ee, oo, eh, and o. Japanese has a sound which is like the English "L" sound, but it is also like the English "R" sound. (That is why it can be difficult for many Japanese to learn to make both "L" and "R" sounds when they speak English.) Japanese has a sound which is not common in English which is usually written Tsu. Also, "o" and "u" can either be short or long. For example, benkyousuru （べんきょうする）(to study).

In Japanese, the verb is at the end of the sentence, and the subject is at the beginning. In many sentences there is no subject. The listener can guess what the subject is by thinking about the context and the form of the verb.

In Japanese, Japan is called Nihon (日本), and the Japanese language is called Nihongo (日本語) (-go means language). Nihongo also means Japanese. Sometimes, the words Nippon and Nippongo are also used, but today these words are thought of as more nationalist, while Nihon is a more neutral word. The kanji characters of the word mean "sun-root", and that is because Japan is often called "The Land of Rising Sun".

Writing system

The Japanese language uses three writing systems. The first two are hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). Hiragana is for writing words from inside Japan. Katakana is mostly for writing sound effects and words from outside of Japan. Both writing system have symbols that mean a syllable. Katakana has straighter edges and sharper corners than hiragana. Hiragana has more curves than katakana.

There is a third way to write, called kanji (漢字), where every word or idea has a picture character taken from Chinese. To be able to fully read Japanese, students must learn around 2,000 kanji. Many kanji are made up from smaller, simpler kanji. Kanji have different sounds when used in different ways, but each kanji still has only certain ways it can be read.

Written Japanese has no spaces between words, so kanji help separate words in a sentence.

Japanese can be written in 2 ways:

1. From left to right, moving from the top toward the bottom of the page (same as in English language).
2. From top to bottom, moving from the right toward the left of the page.

Sentences in Japanese are done like this: subject, object, verb. For example, I ate an apple today (今日、私はりんごを食べました) would be in this order Today, I apple ate.

Examples

Here are some examples of Japanese words :

• 私 (わたし) (watashi) I
• 人 (ひと) (hito) : person
• 女 (おんな) (onna) : woman
• 男 (おとこ) (otoko) : man
• 水 (みず) (mizu) : water
• こんにちは (konnichiwa) : hello (during the middle of the day or afternoon)
• さよなら (sayonara) : goodbye
• はい (hai) : yes
• いいえ (iie) : no

Other websites

This language has its own Wikipedia Project.

See the Japanese language edition

• Japanese Online Dictionary
• Japanese Wikibook (learn Japanese)
• Japanese Wikipedia
• Japanese dictionary
• List of Japanese Kanji characters
• Kana Copybook (PDF)