Japanese

Konnichi wa!

Japanese is a language whose popularity has grown over the years. With the spread of Japanese culture through anime (cartoons), video games and manga (comic books), Japanese is particulalrly well-loved by younger people.

Of course, it is also a language of business as Japan in the second largest economy in the world.

Here are some interesting facts about Japanese:

Japanese, spoken by more than 125 million people in Japan, ranks among the top ten languages of the world. No definite link has been established between Japanese and any other language, living or dead. Though it adopted the Chinese picto-graphic characters in the 3rd century BCE, Japanese is not, genetically related to Chinese. Japanese does resemble Korean in grammatical structure, and though some scholars have suggested that they are related, this remains to be proven.

The Japanese ideographs, known as kanji, number in the thousands. The kanji designate the chief meaningful words of the language-nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They are, supplemented by the kana, or syllabic characters, which are used chiefly to designate suffixes, particles, conjunctions, and other grammatical forms. Each kana character stands for a single syllable rather than for a whole word. Theoretically any Japanese word can be written exclusively in the kana but the large number of homonyms in the language makes this impractical. Modern Japanese, is written with a mixture of kanji and kana characters. Japanese is generally written vertically beginning on the right, but many texts today are written horizontally to permit the inclusion of English words, Arabic numerals, and mathematical and chemical formulas. Though various movements over the years have advocated the adoption of the Roman script, native tradition and the great Japanese literary heritage militate against such a change.

Feel a desire to learn Japanese now? Language Door San Diego can help with that! For information on our Japanese classes, visit the following link to our website:

http://languagedoor.com/san_diego_languages/japanese.html