Introduction to Japanese

1. Introduction to Japanese

1.1. Preface

Thank you very much for visiting my Japanese language site. My name is TAKASUGI Shinji (surname first - 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.

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.

Rank	Language	Language Family	Population	Area
1	Mandarin Chinese	Sino-Tibetan	885,000,000	China
2	English	Indo-European	322,000,000	North America, U.K., Australia
3	Spanish	Indo-European	266,000,000	Latin America, Spain
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	66,897,000	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	56,584,000	Pakistan

Note: 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. Even Korean, which is the nearest kin to Japanese, belongs to a different 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 Korea, and mixed with the native Japanese, who had a south Asian origin.

Japanese doesn't seem to English speakers to be as friendly as other European languages first time, because its grammar is quite different from that of 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? In a later chapter I will explain the way to make question sentences 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.

1.3. Japanese characters

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

Japanese didn't have a character to describe itself 2000 years ago. After contact with the Chinese, the Japanese imported Han characters, which have been being used in China, Korea, and Japan. The Japanese call Han characters kanji.

The kanji stands for both meanings and pronunciations.
Here is an example of the kanji.

This kanji means tree, and its pronunciation is "ki".

Since kanjis have both meanings and pronunciations, they are not good for describing only pronunciation. Japanese people picked out about 50 kanjis and simplified them to create new character sets, which are now called hiraganas and katakanas. They are also called kana characters. Kanas stand only for pronunciations, unlike kanjis.

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

All you have to learn first is hiraganas, because learning hiraganas is enough for beginners to learn Japanese grammar and words. You don't have to learn katakanas or kanjis now. There are too many kanjis to memorize, because modern Japanese people use about 1000 kanjis in daily life.

Japanese characters are written vertically from top to bottom, and lines are written from right to left. So the title of a book is on the right side of the front cover. Japanese can be also written exactly like European languages, 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.

1.4. Phonemes vs. pronunciations

Phonemes are the fundamental elements of pronunciations in a language. Pronunciations can vary with dialects and speakers, but the set of phonemes stay the same. For example, /t/ in time and /t/ in water have different pronunciations in American English. (Letters enclosed by slashes mean phonemes.) But they are the same phoneme, because American English speakers treat them as the same element.

In this course, I use phonemes to describe Japanese pronunciations to obtain the following two advantages:

Hiraganas and katakanas are categorized for their consonant phoneme.
Japanese phonemes are related to its grammar, so they will help you learn the grammar.

There is a disadvantage however. You need to memorize the relationship of phonemes and pronunciations, because some of phonemes have different pronunciations from what you might expect. For instance, the Japanese word for the English word hello is /koNnitiwa/, which is pronounced as "ko, n, ni, chi, wa" (five syllables). In this case, /ko/, /ni/, and /wa/ have the pronunciations that you expect them to have, but /N/ and /ti/ are pronounced as "n" and "chi" respectively.

The Romanization of Japanese (writing with alphabets) is the same as pronunciations of kanas, unless explicitly indicated in kana tables in later chapters. You should use Romanization when you write Japanese with alphabets. For example, the Romanization of the word for hello is "konnichiwa".

1.5. Syllables and kanas

In Japanese, almost all of consonants are followed by vowels. The exception is /y/, /N/, and /Q/. (/y/ is similar to English "y"; /N/ and /Q/ are explained later)
Japanese syllables have either one of the following structures:

one vowel
one consonant + one vowel
one consonant + /y/ + one vowel
/N/
/Q/

Important: Every syllable has the same length of time in Japanese. Some linguists use the word mora instead of syllable to emphasize the fact.

One kana (hiragana or katakana) stands for one syllable, not one phoneme. You cannot describe consonants which are not followed by vowels, but you don't need them, because Japanese doesn't have such pronunciations.

1.6. Accents

There are two kinds of accent in world languages: stress accents and tonic accents. English has stress accents, where the stronger voice determines accents. Japanese has tonic accents, where the higher tone of voice determines accents. The strength of voice doesn't matter at all in Japanese. Unlike Chinese, wrong tones don't make much trouble, so you can skip this section if you want to master Japanese characters first.

Let's think about the Japanese word /asagao/ (means morning glory, a kind of flower) for an example. It consists of four syllables: /a/, /sa/, /ga/, and /o/. Each syllable must have either a lower tone or a higher tone, because Japanese has tonic accents. In this case, the second syllable /sa/ has a higher tone, and the others have lower tones.

What is most important for Japanese accents is a boundary between a higher tone and a lower tone. For the word /asagao/, the boundary between the syllables /sa/ and /ga/ is important, because the former has a higher tone and the latter has a lower tone. Such boundary is called an accent fall, which means a transition from a higher-tone syllable to a lower-tone one. There is an important rule: a word has at most one accent fall, and the tone never rises in a word after it becomes low. You can determine each syllable's tone in a word if you know where the accent fall of the word is. I will explain how to do that in a later chapter.

In this course, I use italic letters for higher tones, and I also use apostrophes for accent falls. For example, the word /asagao/ will be written as /asa'gao/.

A combined word has at most one accent fall too, so its tone is clearly different from a mere combination of the tones of its base words. The accent fall of the last word often remains intact. It is opposite from English, in which the first stress in a combined word is often kept, such as "bláckboard" and "dárkroom".

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