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LANGUAGE |
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First the good news. Picking up a few words of Japanese, even
managing a sentence or two, is not difficult. Pronunciation is simple
and standard and there are few exceptions to the straightforward grammar
rules. With a couple of weeks' effort you should be able to read the
words spelled out in hiragana and katakana, Japanese phonetic characters,
even if you can't understand them. And, any time spent learning Japanese
will be amply rewarded by the thrilled response you'll elicit from the
locals, who'll always politely comment on your fine linguistic ability.
The bad news is that it takes a very great effort indeed to become
halfway proficient in Japanese, let alone master the language. One of
the main stumbling blocks is the thousands of kanji characters that need
to be memorized, most of which have at least two pronunciations,
depending on the sentence and their combination with other characters.
Another major difference is the multiple levels of politeness embodied
in Japanese, married with different sets of words used by men and women
(although this is less of a problem). Finally, as you move around Japan
there are different dialects to deal with, such as Osaka-ben, the
dialect of the Kansai area, involving whole new vocabularies.
Japanese characters
The exact origins of Japanese are a mystery, and until the sixth century
it only existed in the spoken form. Once the Japanese imported Chinese
characters, known as kanji , they began to develop their own forms of
written language.
Japanese is now written in a combination of three systems. The most
difficult of the three to master is kanji (Chinese ideograms), which
originally developed as mini-pictures of the word they stand for. To be
able to read a newspaper, you'll need to know around 2000 kanji , much
more difficult than it sounds since what each one means varies with its
context.
The easier writing systems to pick up are the phonetic syllabaries,
hiragana and katakana . Both have 45 regular characters and can be
learned within a couple of weeks. Hiragana is used for Japanese words,
while katakana , with the squarer characters, is used mainly for loan
words from Western languages (especially English) and technical names.
Increasingly, romaji , the roman script used to spell out Japanese words,
is also used in advertisements and magazines. Good places to practise
reading hiragana and katakana are on the advertisements plastered in
train carriages and on restaurant menus.
The first five letters in hiragana and katakana ( a, i, u, e, o ) are
the vowel sounds . The remainder are a combination of a consonant and a
vowel (eg. ka, ki, ku, ke, ko ), with the exception of n , the only
consonant that exists on its own. While hiragana provides an exact
phonetic reading of all Japanese words, it's a mistake to think that
katakana does the same for foreign loan words. Often words are shortened,
hence television becomes terebi and sexual harassment sekuhara .
Sometimes, they become almost unrecognizable, as with kakuteru , which
is cocktail.
Traditionally, Japanese is written in vertical columns and read right to
left. However, the Western way of writing from left to right,
horizontally from top to bottom is increasingly being used. In the media
and on signs you'll see a mixture of the two ways of writing
Grammar
There are several significant grammar differences between Japanese and
European languages. Verbs do not change according to the person or
number, so that ikimasu can mean "I go", "he/she/it goes", or "we/they
go". Pronouns , such as i and they, are usually omitted, since it's
clear from the context who or what the speaker is referring to. There
are no definite articles , and nouns stay the same whether they refer to
singular or plural words.
From the point of view of English grammar, Japanese sentences are
structured back to front. An English speaker would say "I am going to
Tokyo" which in Japanese would translate directly as "Tokyo to going".
Placing the sound "ka" at the end of a verb indicates a question , hence
Tokyo e ikimasu-ka means "Are you going to Tokyo?". There are also
levels of politeness to contend with, which alter the way the verb is
conjugated, and sometimes change the word entirely. For the most part,
stick to the polite masu form of verbs and you'll be fine.
If you want to learn more about the language and have a wider range of
expressions and vocabulary at your command than those listed here,
invest in a phrasebook or dictionary. Japanese: A Rough Guide Phrasebook
is user-friendly and combines essential phrases and expressions with a
dictionary section and menu reader. The phonetic translations in this
phrasebook are rendered slightly differently from the standard way
romaji is written in this book, as an aid to pronunciation. One of the
best books for learning Japanese more thoroughly is Japanese For Busy
People (Kodansha), which comes in three parts and is often used as a set
text in Japanese-language classes. A worthy alternative, although more
difficult to buy outside of Japan, is Communicative Japanese for Time
Pressed People (Aratake Publishing).
Common words and phrases in Japanese
To begin, select a topic in the navigation bar to the left
Pronunciation
Throughout this guide, Japanese words have been transliterated into the
standard Hepburn system of romanization, called romaji . Pronunciation
is as follows:
a as in r a ther
i as in macaron i , or ee
u as in p u t, or oo
e as in b e d; e is always pronounced, even at the end of a word
o as in n o t
ae as in the two separate sounds, ah-eh
ai as in Th ai
ei as in w ei ght
ie as in two separate sounds, ee-eh
ue as in two separate sounds, oo-eh
g , a hard sound as in g irl
s as in ma ss (never z)
y as in y et
A bar over a vowel or "ii" means that the vowel sound is twice as long
as a vowel without a bar. Only where words are well known in English,
such as Tokyo, Kyoto, judo and shogun, have we not used a bar to
indicate long vowel sounds. Sometimes, vowel sounds are shortened or
softened, for example, the verb desu sounds more like des when
pronounced, and sukiyaki like skiyaki . Apart from this, all syllables
in Japanese words are evenly stressed and pronounced in full. For
example, Nagano is Na-ga-no, not Na-GA-no.
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