|
[ 前 置 き - i n t r o d u c t i o n ]
An Introduction to the Japanese Language
When the subject of Japanese is brought up, most people seem to think that it's an extremely difficult language, or wonder why everyone in Japan isn't illiterate. While Japanese is definitely not the easiest language to learn, it's a fascinating language and not nearly as bad as rumors might have you believe. Either way, let's start at the beginning.
Japanese uses three 'scripts.' I won't call them 'alphabets' because in fact they aren't, but two of them are somewhat similar. These scripts are not used separately; rather, many sentences contain all three. This is a difficult concept to understand without first knowing their purposes.
Hiragana
The 'backbone' of the Japanese writing system is a syllabary known as hiragana. A syllabary is similar to an alphabet, but rather than being divided into letters that can then be combined into syllables, it is comprised of characters that represent individual syllables. Since all sounds in Japanese can be expressed in hiragana, all of written Japanese could in fact be written in hiragana, but that is very rarely if ever done. Hiragana is always used for particles, verb/adjective endings, and native Japanese words that are not written in kanji. It is also sometimes used for writing words that a specific person may not know how to write in kanji.
Katakana
The other syllabary used in Japanese writing is katakana. Katakana has the same sounds used in hiragana, as well as other unusual sounds that are generally never written in hiragana. The main purpose of katakana is for writing foreign words, names, places, and the like, which make up a very large part of the language. This is also why there are sounds used in katakana that no native Japanese words use. Katakana is also often used to write the names of animals, onomatopoeic words, and words a specific person may not know how to write in kanji.
Kanji
The last system of writing is the one people tend to think of when talking about Japanese. Kanji is the Japanese word for the tens of thousands of Chinese characters, which are used in written Japanese. Luckily, you'll only need to learn 1,945 of them (more on that later). While that's still quite a few, you may find kanji to be a very interesting and fun part of the Japanese language.
Now to see these scripts in action, let's take a look at an example sentence:
彼は有名なムービースターです。
Kare wa yuumei na muubiisutaa desu.
He is a famous movie star.
In the above example, hiragana is represented by white, katakana by blue, and kanji by grey. Kare is the pronoun 'he,' yuumei (or more accurately, yuumei-na) is the adjective 'famous,' and muubiisutaa is the English word 'movie star.' Hiragana is used for the subject marker wa, the adjective ending na, and the copula verb desu, meaning 'is' in this case.
Pronunciation
Chances are you had to struggle with pronouncing the words above. Luckily, the Japanese language has a far more consistent system of pronunciation than English, especially since the characters represent sounds instead of letters. That's not to say it doesn't have it's share of exceptions, but even those are fairly consistent. Let's start by looking at hiragana for a visual explanation.
Hiragana →
|