Introduction to Japanese

1.1. Introduction to Japanese

1.1.1. Preface

Thank you very much for visiting my Japanese language site. My name is TAKASUGI Shinji (surname first is the Japanese way). I am a native Japanese speaker living in Yokohama, Japan. Please let me know when you find errors.

The purpose of this site is to provide a way to learn Japanese by yourself. I would like to introduce Japanese to you, and I will be glad if you are interested in it. I focus on the similarities and differences between Japanese and English.

If you really want to master Japanese, I recommend a good textbook and a dictionary, because I think it is vocabulary, not grammar, that is the key to mastering a language. I do my best to make my site good, but the number of words described here is still limited.

1.1.2. What is the Japanese language?

The Japanese language is the official language of Japan, and it is the eighth most popular language in the world. The table below shows the principal languages of the world, according to Ethnologue, 13th edition, 1996-1999.

Rank	Language	Language Family	Population	Area
1	Mandarin Chinese	Sino-Tibetan	885,000,000	China
2	Spanish	Indo-European	332,000,000	Latin America, Spain
3	English	Indo-European	322,000,000	North America, U.K., Australia
4	Bengali	Indo-European	189,000,000	Bangladesh, India
5	Hindi	Indo-European	182,000,000	India
6	Portuguese	Indo-European	170,000,000	Brazil, Portugal
7	Russian	Indo-European	170,000,000	Russia
8	Japanese	Japanese	125,000,000	Japan
9	Standard German	Indo-European	98,000,000	Germany
10	Wu Chinese	Sino-Tibetan	77,175,000	China
11	Javanese	Austronesian	75,500,800	Indonesia
12	Korean	Korean	75,000,000	Korea
13	French	Indo-European	72,000,000	France
14	Vietnamese	Austro-Asiatic	67,662,000	Viet Nam
15	Telugu	Dravidian	66,350,000	India
16	Yue Chinese	Sino-Tibetan	66,000,000	China
17	Marathi	Indo-European	64,783,000	India
18	Tamil	Dravidian	63,075,000	India
19	Turkish	Altaic	59,000,000	Turkey
20	Urdu	Indo-European	58,000,000	Pakistan

Note: Modern Arabic is so diverse that it is divided into dozens of languages. The most popular one is Egyptian Spoken Arabic, which has a population of 42,500,000.

Linguists think languages of the same language family have a common ancestor, because they have similar grammar and vocabularies. That's why it is relatively easy for English speakers to learn European languages. Almost all European languages belong to the Indo-European language family. The exceptions are Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and some minorities.

Japanese is not a member of the Indo-European language family. In fact, Japanese is virtually the only member of the Japanese language family, considering Ryukyuan languages, languages of Okinawa, are not commonly used now. Korean, which is the nearest kin to Japanese other than Ryukyuan languages, belongs to another language family. The origin of Japanese and Japanese people is unknown, but anthropologists suppose that the majority of the ancestors of the Japanese came to Japan from north Asia through Korean Peninsula, and mixed with the native Japanese, who had a southeast Asian origin.

Probably European people don't know the diversity of Asian languages. Even though Korean has similar grammar to Japanese, it has very different vocabularies, which is why Korean and Japanese don't belong to the same language family. Chinese had influenced Japanese for many years, in particular through imported words, but its grammar has no relationship to Japanese. Ainu people, the other people of Japan, speak the Ainu language, which is also different from Japanese. The table below shows how Mandarin Chinese and Ainu are different from Japanese. All the sentences mean "I drink water in my house."

Japanese

Watashi
(I)

wa
(topic)

ie
(house)

de
(in)

mizu
(water)

o
(object)

nomu.
(drink)

Mandarin

Wô
(I)

zài
(in)

jia¯
(house)

he¯
(drink)

shûi.
(water)

Ainu

K=uni
(my house)

ta
(in)

wakka
(water)

ku=ku.
(I drink)

Japanese doesn't seem to English speakers to be as friendly as other European languages first time, because it is very different from English. But don't be afraid. Japanese is not as difficult as you might think. In a sense, Japanese is more logical than English; for example, it has only two irregular verbs. It's also simpler than European languages in a sense; it has no singular or plural, no gender, or no agreement of verbs.

Learning a non-European language is a good way for European language speakers to know general ideas of human languages and understand characteristics of European languages. You might think the subject-verb inversion for questions is nothing strange, but the fact is that the inversion is rarely found outside of Europe. Among thousands of languages in the world, English is the only language that uses a meaningless auxiliary verb for the inversion. When you change the sentence "He went there" to the question "Did he go there?" , not to "Went he there?" , you experience a unique rule of English. Have you ever imagined English is a strange language? I will explain in a later chapter the way to make questions in Japanese, which is common and easy.

If you speak a non-European language, your language may be more similar to Japanese than to English. Don't think in English in that case.

1.1.3. Japanese characters

The Japanese language has three sets of characters - hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

The Japanese language didn't have written characters two thousand years ago. After contact with the Chinese, the Japanese imported Han characters, which Japanese people call kanji. Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese have been using Han characters, and Vietnamese had used them until the 19th century.

Kanji are ideographs, i.e. they stand for both meaning and pronunciation. Here is an example of kanji:

The Japanese pronunciation of this kanji is "ame", which has nothing to do with its Chinese pronunciation "yû", while it means rain in both of the languages.

Kanji is a good writing system - they can carry meaning beyond the language barrier, and linguists also have proven that reading ideographs is faster than reading phonograms such as alphabets because ideographs are changed to meaning directly in your brain while phonograms are changed to pronunciation first and changed to meaning then. Dyslexics can hardly read phonograms but they can understand ideographs, if they know them. The ability to read phonograms can be damaged more easily because of its complexity.

But it is also useful to have phonograms, which describe only pronunciation. More than a thousand years ago, Japanese people picked out about fifty kanji and simplified them to create new character sets now called hiragana and katakana. This process was the same as how slaves in Sinai created alphabets from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The difference is that kanji are alive, while hieroglyphs are dead.

Hiragana and katakana are also called kana. Kana stand only for pronunciations, unlike kanji. Here is an example of hiragana:

These two hiragana represent the pronunciations "a" and "me", which combination is "ame" (rain). Each of the hiragana doesn't have meaning, just has pronunciation.

The two kana sets, hiragana and katakana, are essentially the same, but they have different shapes, like English has capital letters and small letters. Hiragana are used for Japanese words, while katakana are used for imported words. So you can easily spot imported words.

Kanji, hiragana and katakana are used together, and you must master all of them eventually in order to read Japanese texts. But all you have to learn first is hiragana, because learning hiragana is enough for beginners to learn Japanese grammar and words. You don't have to learn katakana or kanji now. Modern Japanese people use about 2000 kanji in daily life.

Japanese characters are written vertically from top to bottom, and lines are written from right to left. Japanese can be written like European languages too, i.e. characters are written horizontally from left to right, lines from top to bottom. Newspapers and novels are almost always written in the vertical way, and scientific books are almost always written in the horizontal way. Computers use the latter, and they are rarely able to display characters in the vertical way. I use the horizontal way in this site, because it is easier to use with alphabets.

The two ways are shown below.

Horizontal:

		First line,
		Second line,
		Third line.

Vertical:


T h i r d l i n e .	S e c o n d l i n e ,	F i r s t l i n e ,

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