Introduction to the Language
When someone mentions the Japanese language, what comes to mind? Most people probably think of either the written language with all the thousands of symbols or think of it as the hardest language on Earth. I've been studying Japanese since 1997. So far, I might say this has been a great little endeavor and I would like to continue it by helping others like me who wish to expand their horizons. I found when I started that many of these great challenges I predicted to encounter were really just exaggerations. The language can be difficult at times, but the core language is, in fact, quite simple. The first step towards learning the language is figuring out which of these exaggerations are truth and which are myths.
The Sound of the Language
First, many people are a bit put off by the way the language sounds. It sounds very foreign and strange to them. In order to learn Japanese, first you must make friends with the language. It might please you to know that almost all the sounds in the language are found in English. If you've ever taken French, you know the pain of having to learn one new sound after the next. This is not a problem in Japanese though. The thing that makes it a bit difficult at first is that the Japanese don't accent their words like we do. The best way to get used to the way the language sounds is by listening it to often and learning the sounds of the language. After listening to it for a while, you wil be able to pick out sounds more easily and quickly.
Ways of Thinking
One myth about the language is that Japanese people think in a different way than we do. This is a horrible lie that is create by our inability to understand the writting system. Japanese is processed in the same areas in the brain as all other languages. The grammar is different from English, but that doesn't mean the original thought is different from the English one.
The Written Language
I'm sure all of you have seen at one point or another written Japanese or writting of another Oriental language. You've probably wondered how anyone could learn all those symbols. It is undoubtedly a very difficult task to do this. To put it bluntly, this is the absolute hardest part of the language. Even so, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible. The characters themselves are not hard at all, though. You learn only the most basic ones first. After you get used to them, the harder and more complex characters become just as easy; they just take a bit longer to write. The hard part comes when you think of how many characters you have to learn. Remember this one phrase and the written language should be no problem at all: "Rome wasn't built in a day."
In Japanese, though, there is a lot of relief to this. Over the centuries, the Chinese there have invented over 40,000 characters. In Japanese, though, there are less than 2000 characters you need to know if you wish to be completely fluent. But most of the time, you will only see about 1000 of those on a regular basis. And if that's not enough, Japanese also has 2 "alphabets" that are completely phonetic (see Hiragana and Katakana).
Even though Japanese has an "alphabet," you must also know how to use the more complex symbols that stand for entire words. In standard writting, both the symbols that stand for entire words and the letter of these "alphabets" are used together.
The Language Itself
The actual language is very simple, but very different when compared to English or European languages. It helps quite a bit if you took some French or Spanish before, but I'll try to explain things as best I can for those of you who haven't. If you have taken French or Spanish you may remember things like this:
Aller Ir
Je vais Yo voy
Tu vas Tu vas
Il va El va
Nous allons Nosotros vamos
Vous allez ---
Ils vont Ellos van
One of the first things you learn is how to "conjugate" verbs. You had to add endings that agreed with the subeject of the sentence. Well in Japanese, there is no such agreement:
Watashi wa ikimasu
Anata wa ikimasu
Kare wa ikimasu
All three have the verb "ikimasu" at the end. All three are the same word. There are no changes in spelling or anything.
You may also remember agreeing adjectives with the word they modified:
Une maison blanche una casa Blanca
Well in Japanese, there is no agreement at all with adjectives either. There is also no Masculine/Feminine distinction in words nor any article. There are no words for "a" or "the." There is also no distinction between Singular/Plural:
Inu is the word for "dog." It can mean:
-a dog
-some dogs
-the dog
-the dogs
It depends on context. It is possible to distinguish the actual number you saw, but unless it is important to the conversation, you don't need to say how many there were. One major thing you should remember about Japanese is that it is very reliant on context.
One last thing about Japanese that will make it seem very easy. In French and Spanish, there are hundreds of irregular verbs. In Japanese, there are only 2 that are completely irregular and about 4 others that change only in one form. On top of that, you can use any of the irregular verbs in the present tense without even knowing how to conjugate them.
Return