The Japanese Language

The Japanese language is a unique one, having been said to be one of the most difficult languages to learn to speak fluently. While it's true that it isn't easy to learn Japanese, neither is it easy to learn any other language, especially our native English. Typically when learning a language there are those who go through their studies of its grammar and insult the language by saying that a certain structure is backward or an unintelligent way to do things when compared to English. The fact is that even English has its oddities and insensible constructions and will be given their due attention throughout the rest of this essay.

The Japanese language consists of relatively few sounds and doesn't pose much of a problem as far as the pronunciation of words for learners. (Japan-guide.com) The written language consists of kanji which were brought over from China and 46 characters in both hiragana and katakana. Out of the thousands of kanji that exist in China today, only 1,945 are governmentally approved for use in Japan and are called jouyou kanji. Hiragana and katakana are known together as simply "kana" and are called syllabaries, not alphabets. As the word would have you believe, a syllabary is a collection of characters which form the syllables of a word instead of the individual sounds that alphabets make up. The difference between the two syllabaries is that hiragana is used for spelling out words that do not have kanji assigned to them and for verb endings and sentence particles. Katakana are mainly used to spell words of foreign origin, foreign names, company names, and new Japanese words.

Japanese can be written one of two ways: in the western style, horizontal rows of text being read from left to right or in the traditional way, vertical rows of text being read from right to left. These two systems exist in Japan side by side today, neither one being used by a real majority. (Japan-guide.com) Magazines such as Shonen Jump and other manga are printed both in the United States and in Japan "backward"; the binding is held in the reader's right hand and opened in a way that is opposite from books written in languages such as English.

The syntax of the language is subject-object-verb and is different from the English syntax of subject-verb-object. "You may not even realize this, but word order is crucially important in English (and in many Indo-European languages). We understand what role a noun is playing (subject, direct object, and etcetera) largely by where it is in the sentence." (Allen, "Sentence Structure"). If I were to say, "I threw the ball at the cat", then you would know that the word "I" is the subject because it comes before the verb. The word "ball" is the direct object of the sentence because of its position in word order. "I threw at the cat the ball" is a strange sentence, but we can still understand it. But, "At the cat threw the ball I"? Or "Threw the ball I at the cat?" These are a mess! Japanese doesn't have this problem.

Word order is flexible in Japanese because every word is marked in the sentence, its grammatical job stamped cleanly on its proverbial forehead. We don't do this in English and so word order is very crucial in making sense of what we say and write. Particles are used in Japanese to get around this problem, but are sometimes a problem themselves for learners of the language. Naoko Chino has this to say:

".. Particles are next to meaningless as isolated entities. A particle, in fact, might be defined as a non-conjugating part of speech, bearing an absolute minimum of independent meaning, which attaches itself to other parts of speech and thereby places them in context." ("All About Particles", 7.)

This means that if I were to say in Japanese "neko no", I would be saying "cat's". The equivalent of the Japanese particle in English here would be "'s". What does it mean? It doesn't mean anything, just the same as the particle "no" in Japanese doesn't mean anything. It makes the noun possessive and that is all.

".. [particles] tend to work as postpositions, conjunctions (and, or, nor, etc), possessives, and just about anything else that isn't a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb." (Allen, "Particles")

In the following Japanese sentence, the particles are written in bold.

Ashita wa yuki ga furou tomo, iku tsumori da.

Ã÷ÈÕ݆ѐ©¤¬½µ¤í¤¦¤È¤â¡¢¤¤¤¯·e¤â¤ê¤À¡£

"Even if it should snow tomorrow, I intend to go."

Particles are crucial to understanding the Japanese and should not be taken lightly by a student of the language. They eliminate the need for a nearly inflexible word order in the language. This is not to say that word order is entirely flexible in Japanese. The main verb must come at the end and in general, the subject is preferred to come before the object. (Allen, "Word Order: "John Mary the Book Gave"?") English is so dependent on word order that often we only recognize questions because of it. The real secret is to flip the subject and the verb. (Allen.) In Japanese there is a sentence particle that signifies a question and comes at the very end of a sentence. This particle is "¤«" or "ka" and can be placed at the end of any sentence in Japanese to make it a question.

While the word order in Japanese is pretty flexible, almost the opposite can be said about clause order. The main independent clause must come last. "This is difficult for English speakers because (1) we vary clause order for emphasis, and (2) we are free to tack extra clauses and phrases onto the end of our sentences if we decide to to add more information during mid-sentence." (Allen, "Clause Order") It's much more difficult in Japanese to add extra information after you've already dove head long into a sentence. In English it's easier for us to decide to add extra information at the end of a sentence.

When it comes to counting things, the Japanese have what are called "counters" that come after a number. For instance, the counter gatsu is used to count months. If you wanted to say "April", you would say shi-gatsu, "shi" being one of the two possible words for "four". Other counters exist for animals (hiki), people (nin), flat objects (mai), and etcetera. In English, our counting system is based on factors of 1,000 once you get to large numbers. (Allen, "Numbers".) We have thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, and then one million. Japanese has a whole "new" word for ten thousand and this is "man" or "Íò". One million is expressed in units of man. The next increment, which is one hundred million, has another name: "oku". This makes Japanese numbers confusing to the westerner whether the person is hearing the number or reading it. Other annoyances include the fact that certain days of the month have special names, the first through the tenth and also the fourteenth, twentieth, and twenty-fourth. (Allen, "Numbers".)

Another quirk of the Japanese language (or maybe our language is the one with the quirk?) is that they have no plural nouns. If you look closely in English, when we make things plural, we tend to overdo it. If you don't know what I mean, try this:

One cat.

Two cats.

If "two" is already plural, then why do we need to add an "s" on the end of "cat" for the phrase to make any sense to our ears? Isn't this redundant and unnecessary?

English verbs tend to confuse the learners of our language, because they are sometimes inconsistent in the way that they conjugate. Think of the verb "go" and how it conjugates. Go, will go, am going, have gone, had gone, will have gone, and went. In Japanese there are essentially two tenses to verbs, but there are far more verbs in Japanese than in English and even more so than in Latin. There are at least 38 verb conjugations in Japanese and to the English mind, this seems ridiculous, but it really isn't. These conjugations help to express emotion, need, want, negation, condition, level of politeness, etcetera. (Allen, "Verbs Part I".)

".. in Japanese [verb conjugations] are relatively simple , partly because the conjugation patterns are not affected by gender, person, or number. Even tense conjugations are quite regular... Japanese rules for the formal and informal past tense apply equally to all verbs with only a handful of exceptions." (Chino, "Japanese Verbs at a Glance" 8.)

There are actually three types of verbs in Japanese, godan, ichidan, and the irregular verbs. Time is not the focus of Japanese verbs. English is very particular when it comes to explaining exactly when something took place, which is why we have all the "am going"s and "had gone"s and "will have gone"s. In Japanese this isn't really an issue. There are really only two tenses in Japanese and those are the present and the past. They don't worry about time relationships because they can get all that from the context of the conversation. Verbs in Japanese instead express subtleties that we can't express in English without adding extra words to the sentence. Verb conjugations in Japanese are used to express volition, strong volition, desire to do something, suggestions, belief that something may occur, asking permission, invitations, and etcetera. (Allen.) While we think that remembering all these conjugations would be difficult and tedious, the fact is that all of these conjugations are almost completely predictable. In fact, the verbs that don't conjugate like the rest are placed into their own group, which only consists of two: suru, to do, and kuru, to come.

Something strange about Japanese verbs, though, is that once a verb is conjugated, you can't go backwards and determine the verb stem out of the context of the situation. The conjugated verb kaeri could have the verb stem kaeru, which means "to go home", or it could be kaeriru, which means to return or to change.

Japanese also has what is called "polite language" or keigo. Even Japanese people have to take lessons on how to speak it, most commonly when they begin working for a company or are in another institution which requires the utmost respect. Both verb ending and honorifics in Japanese change depending on the relation of the speaker to the person being spoken to. Typically, the honorific of san is added onto the end of a person's name that someone is speaking to, unless the person is familiar, in which case it could be chan or kun depending on whether the person being spoken to is female or male. Other honorifics include sensei, senpai, shi, or the very honorific sama. There are also titles given to criminals, those awaiting trial, and those serving a sentence and these are hikoku, y¨­gisha, jukeisha.

Adjectives in Japanese conjugate as well and there are two kinds. As you may have guessed, all of their conjugations are equally as predictable as the conjugations of verbs. Adjective conjugations are used to represent both negation and tense. Oishii sushi is translated as "delicious sushi", where as "sushi wa oishii desu" is translated as "the sushi is delicious". The adjective can be conjugated to mean "not delicious" (oishikunai desu) or "was not delicious" (oishikunakatta desu).

The Japanese language is also full of different dialects, the reason being that the country itself has a long history of both internal and external isolation. (Wikipedia.) "The dialect used in Kagoshima in southern Ky¨±sh¨± is famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects elsewhere in Ky¨±sh¨± as well. Kagoshima dialect is 84% cognate with standard Tokyo dialect." (Wikipedia., "Dialects".)

Japanese is growing popularity as the chosen foreign language of students in the United States. It's upheld as one of the more difficult languages in the world to learn, although it's been said that the hardest language in the world to learn to speak and understand is the one I'm speaking now: English.

The Japanese language is a poetic one, full of subtle nuances and emotion that makes it hard for anyone who doesn't grow up speaking it to understand it. Every language has its own quirks, pros, and cons, but the more other languages are studied, the more we find out that their quirks are sometimes not quirks at all. Sometimes they're just easier ways to say things, at least to the speaker's mind. There are a lot of languages in the world, but I have to admit that from my experience in learning, Japanese is one of the more fascinating ones and holds a place in the future held by no other language.