Throughout history, humanity has made several inventions. Controlling fire, melting metals, and creating the wheel are just a few examples. However, one of the most important things humans began was language. Humans developed and used spoken languages hundreds of thousands of years ago. Their spoken languages were afterward captured in writings. Today, there are more than 7,100 spoken languages worldwide.
Japanese is a member of the Japonic, or Japanese-Ryukyuan, a family of languages. “Japanese Language” is called “日本語” (Nihongo). Among the 7,100 languages, Japanese is one of the most spoken languages in the world. In Japan, the only country where it is the official language, around 128 million people speak Japanese as their first language. Numerous attempts have been made to include the Japonic languages in various language families, including the Ainu, Austroasiatic, Koreanic, and the now-discredited Altaic. Still, none of these ideas have been widely embraced.
Little is known about the prehistory of the language or its introduction to Japan. Only a few Japanese words were documented in Chinese writings from the third century AD, and it wasn’t until the eighth century that significant Old Japanese manuscripts started to appear. The lexicon of Sino-Japanese began to flood into Japan around the beginning of the Heian period (794–1185), which impacted the phonology of Early Middle Japanese. Numerous grammatical modifications and the first use of European loanwords occurred in late Middle Japanese (1185-1600). During the Early Today Japanese period, the core of the standard dialect was transferred from the Kansai region to the Edo region (modern Tokyo) (early 17th century–mid 19th century). The flow of loanwords from European languages significantly increased when Japan’s self-imposed isolation ended in 1853, and words with English roots have become more common.
In addition to its pure vowel system, phonetic vowel and consonant length, and lexically relevant pitch accent, Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with relatively simple phonotactics. The standard word order is subject-object-verb, with particles indicating the grammatical function of each word, and the typical sentence structure is topic-comment. Particles at the end of a sentence can add emphasis, ask a question, or provide an emotive element. No articles and no nouns have grammatical gender or number. To convey the relative rank of the speaker, the listener, and the people referenced, the Japanese language contains a sophisticated system of honorifics. This system uses verb forms and vocabulary.
The writing system combines three different kinds of characters. One is kanji (かんじ), which are basically Chinese characters. The other two are hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ), two distinct syllabaries (or moraic scripts) that the Japanese developed from the more complicated Chinese letters. Latin scripts are occasionally used in Japanese writing (for example, for imported acronyms). Traditional Chinese numerals are used with Arabic numerals in the numeral system.
Here is a short description of each of the three types of main characters and (other(s)).
- Hiragana (ひらがな): Hiragana (ひらがな) is basically a phonetic lettering system. It is used in writing native Japanese words.
- Katakana (カタカナ): Katakana (カタカナ) is also a phonetic lettering system like hiragana but is used in writing loan words, foreign names, or other words that are not native to Japanese.
- Kanji (かんじ): Kanjis (かんじ) are the logographic Chinese characters that are used to write a lot of Japanese words.
- Romaji: Romaji is the Latin script used to help foreigners pronounce the Japanese language.
You could be thinking that the Japanese language is one of the most difficult languages you’ve ever seen. If your native language is not an SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language, it is true. Japanese is an SOV language, hence. But if an SOV language is your first language, you’ll find Japanese incredibly simple. Although many fear kanji because of its strokes, it is not a significant concern. A standard of somewhat more than 2000 kanji was established by the Ministry of Education and Sciences. A well-educated Japanese person can read at least 3000 kanji. A Ph.D. can likely memorize 5000 kanji, mostly in their area of expertise. Higher than 5000 is certainly possible, but among the 5000, many kanji would be extremely rare or unheard of, making it even harder to remember them.
Japanese is one of the most beautiful languages in the world. You should learn, maybe only a few phrases or words. And we promise to keep writing articles to help you learn how to have basic Japanese conversations. Till then, look after yourself. Sayonara!
Source:
Japan From Bangladesh 