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The Japanese language
Japanese is not related to any other family language and, apart from Japan, it is spoken in Guam, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Taiwan with a total of 127 million speakers.Japanese uses 4 distinct systems of writing: kanji, hiragana, katakana and romanji. Kanji consists of about 2000 signs which are based on the Chinese writing system; Hiragana is the first system which Japanese children learn at school and it is use for children literature or simple words such as conjunctions and particles. Foreign words are transcribed through Katakana while Romanji has been recently developed as a Romanization of Japanese words.
Japanese also uses 4 different ways of addressing people: kun, chan, san and sama. Kun is somewhat condescending, chan is used for intimates and children, san is the universal mode and sama is deferential. In addition to this, there is a distinction in the use of vocabulary as for sex, as women use a different vocabulary than men.
Grammar
Since it does not belong to any other family language, Japanese has its own peculiar grammar rules which are unknown to European languages. Japanese is defined a "topic-prominent language", meaning that a sentence is divided in two elements called topic and subject, which are separated one from another. This means that to say "this is Mr. Sanger", Japanese will use two sentences in one, saying something similar to "As for this person, this is Mr Sanger". The Japanese translation is "kochira wa, Sanga san desu", where Kochira is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa, and the rest of the phrase is the comment.Another curious thing about Japanese grammar is that nouns don't inflect as for number and gender: "hon" ("book") is the same in singular and plural. Nevertheless, to convey the idea of quantity for some nouns it exists the phenomenon of reduplication, that is the repetition of the same word two times: "hito" means person, "hitohito" people.
As for verbs, Japanese has a quite simple structure: there are two tenses, past (for past actions) and present (for present and future actions), while the others aspects of the verb are formed with the gerund (-te form) plus an auxiliary.
Slang
It might surprise you, but Japanese is not so far from other languages as many people thing. It has its own set of slang terms which corresponds to colloquialism used in any other language. For instance, if someone invites you for a "apo" (a date), answer "gachoon", that although it means nothing, can be used to express surprise. On the contrary, if you don't like the person who is inviting you out, simply say "dame", a word which signals a "no" answer, even if its meaning can be extended to other expressions such as "it's bad" or "you can't do that". If the person insists and keeps inviting you out, use "Yoseyo!" a quite strong expression meaning "Quit it!" which is perfect when someone is bothering you. But Japanese has to have its peculiarities: the universal word "mama" doesn't have the same meaning it has elsewhere, but is either used for something that is "same as usual” or to say "calm down".Resources related to Languages
- Learn Japanese with The Learning Traveller