Japan Phrases

E book content ( 38 pages) :

Introduction

Japanese 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.

Grammar

Japanese generally employs a subject-object-verb order, using particles to mark the grammatical functions of the words.

Reading/Writing

Reading 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 below.

Pronunciation

Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese or Thai, and is comparatively easy to pronounce.

Vowels

Japanese has both short and long vowels and the distinction is often important. In romanized Japanese, long vowels are marked with a macron, so that ō represents "long O".

Consonants

Particles

Japanese uses certain hiragana characters as particles which mark the grammatical function of a word or phrase in a sentence. Some hiragana are pronounced differently when used as a particle.

Accent / Intonation

Avoid placing too much emphasis on particular words or syllables. Japanese does have stress and intonation, but it is significantly flatter than English. Mastering word stress is a more advanced topic and neglecting it at this point should not interfere with meaning. Just trying to keep your intonation relatively flat will make your attempts to speak Japanese more comprehensible to local listeners. When asking questions, you can raise the tone at the end, as in English.

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