Introduction to Japanese

Japanese sentences are written with a combination of characters called Kanji, Hiragana & Katakana. Kanji consists of old chinese characters & each Kanji symbol represents a full word, phrase or idea.
Hiragana & Katakana are two "alphabets". Each alphabet represents a syllable without any individual meaning, just like English letters.
Romaji is a way of writing Japanese using the English alphabet. Romaji is primarily used for the convenience of foreigners. With Romaji, one can read Japanese without knowing any Japanese writing system

Characteristics of Japanese
The Japanese language has only 5 vowels : A, I, U, E, O
Japanese nouns do not have special forms to show whether they are singular or plural & there are no articles (the, a, an). Ringo means an apple, apples, the apple or the apples. The same for pronouns ~hence this & these have the same word, Kore in Japanese

How To Read A Japanese Word
The easiest way to pronounce a Japanese word is to break it up using a slash(/) after every vowel (a, i, u, e, o) & to read each syllable separately

Good night is read as O/ya/su/mi/na/sa/i/

I am back now is read as Ta/da/i/ma

Word Order
English is a subject-verb-object language. Japanese is a subject-object-verb language.
Generally the subject comes first, then the object and the verb comes at the end of the sentence.

Subject ffffffffffff Object ffffffffffVerb
Tom-san wa ffff Ringo o fffffffTabemasu (Tom eats apple)

Posted By : Jasvale

Labels: Introduction