Overview of the Japanese Language

Coming from English, Japanese is one of the most difficult languages on learn. It's so difficult to learn because nearly every aspect of the language is different. The words, the grammar, the ideas, the culture, and the way Japanese is used all differ from English.

In fact, the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Service Institute classifies Japanese as a Category IV language, which requires a minimum of 2200 hours of class time (88 weeks of 5-hour daily training) to achieve a General Professional Proficiency level. It is the Institute's high ranking, shared only by Arabic, Chinese, and Korean.

The best way to learn Japanese, and any language, is to be immersed in the language. Have daily contact with the language, and try to find a balance of using all four or five methods of communicating with a language. These four methods are: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Sometimes, people break speaking into two methods: speaking written or prepared words and speaking your own improvised thoughts. Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing is also the order of difficulty of performing them.

By being in Japan, listening becomes a daily routine. However, it can be easy to shut everything out and ignore what it said around you. In your native country listening to your native language, you can hear and understand everything around you. You are part of the public consciousness. In a foreign country with a foreign language, you're no longer able to naturally understand everything. You have to work at it. And work is often exhausting, which makes it easy to tune out others.

There's a lot to understand, and it's possible that there's some things that you'll never understand. But, as time goes on, you will have the ability to understand some things, and be able to connect dots to understand things. If you get in the habit of tuning out others, you rob yourself of the ability to naturally understand your surroundings. So, don't tune out too much. Make attempts at understanding.

When you hear common phrases, or sometimes when people talk with you. Try repeating what they say. This may seem stupid, but this is how babies naturally begin to learn languages. Which, also may seem stupid for you. Of course, as adults, we can also learn the rules of the languages and compare them with our own language. The combination of these two things will allow use to learn the language.

Listening becomes the easiest method of communication in Japan because you have so many passive opportunities to practice. Writing is the most difficult because you are not only outputting what you know of the language, but you have to activity do it to get better at it. It takes the most work and time out of the others.

Unlike English with its 26 letters (or 52, including both upper and lowercase alphabets), Japanese uses three sets of alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana have 46 characters each. Kanji, on the other hand, has over 10,000. Although, there are hundreds or thousands of kanji that are outdated. High School graduates are expected to know the most common 2,000. The Genki books only go through about 320.

All three of these alphabets are used together. Take a look at this sentence:

ジム先生は店に行きます。

The first two characters are ジム, katakana. Katakana is almost exclusively used for foreign words in the Japanese language. Both Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic alphabets, so each of the characters have specific sounds that are said the exact same way wherever they are in the sentence, with a few exceptions. ジム is my name, Jim, which is phonetically spelled.

The next two characters are 先生, kanji. In sentences, kanji are used for solid words, such as Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives. In this sentence, we have 3 words using kanji: 先生, 店, and 行く. 先生 is sensei, or teacher. Combined with my name ジム先生, it's used as a suffix to denote that I'm a teacher. Generally, non-casually, when referring to other people, you use a suffix with their name. 店 is mise, or store. And, 行く is iku, or the verb, to go.

The other characters in the sentence (は, に, きます) are hiragana. This is getting ahead of ourselves, but they are used in the sentence as particles and a conjugation. Using は(wa) after my name ジム先生は denotes that I'm the subject of the sentence. Using に(ni) with shop 店に denotes the direction of the action. And, 行きます(ikimasu) is the present positive conjugation of the verb 行く, meaning to go.

Putting the meaning together: Jim goes to the store. (or Mr. Jim goes to the store.)

Even though there are three writing systems, both katakana and kanji can be written in hiragana, which is the first alphabet we'll learn. Additionally, every hiragana character can be written in Alphabetic characters, which is where we'll start when learning words. This is called Romaji.

Let's go back to our sentence.

ジム先生は店に行きます。
じむせんせいは みせに いきます。
jimu-sensei wa mise ni ikimasu

Looking at the sentence in Romaji can help with pronunciation. Each hiragana has a specific sound and pronunciation doesn't change based on spelling as in English. Here's all the Hiragana, with Romaji to the right.

Speaking in terms of English pronunciation, the overall Japanese language is based on 5 vowel sounds with a combination of the above consonants. The vowel sounds do not change when paired with other characters.

Also, you may have noticed that ji, from my name じむ, is not listed in the alphabet. There are certain characters that can take a ten-ten mark or a maru mark to slightly expand the alphabet. し(shi) becomes じ(ji).

Note: Often students wonder, if you can write a sentence using only hiragana, a much less complex writing system, why ever use the other two? Why not write everything in hiragana.

ジム先生は店に行きます。 vs.　じむせんせいは みせに いきます。

Coming from English, it makes sense to write everything using a limited number of characters, but the overall readability of the kanji sentence is far higher than the second. In fact, I added spaces in the hiragana sentence to improve its readability, but you still have to read each character to understand the words. The kanji sentence doesn't even need it.

While we don't use Kanji in English, the idea of using symbols to form a familiar shape representing a word is not so foreign. We've been reading and writing English since we were children, and one of the natural passive techniques we've developed is recognizing a word purely based on its shape. As long as the shape of the word fits the pattern we're used to, we can read and understand the word immediately without looking at each of the letters.

Kanji works the same way. Once you know the meaning of the kanji, you don't even have to read the whole sentence. Because there are so many kanji, much of a sentence's ambiguity is also removed. When I say, "light" without any context, do I mean something that shines on to a surface or something that's not heavy? Much like English, Japan has words written in Hiragana the same way with different meanings. But when using Kanji, the meaning is clear.

Again, learning Japanese is not a simple process. Just takes things step-by-step. Ask questions. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. And, always try.