In this Episode, let's embrace the Japanese language structure and answer some questions you might still have about the language: the way its sentences are built and written, and especially, how much Japanese and Chinese are actually alike.
Japanese VS Chinese
Are they related?
The Japanese, or 日本語 Nihongo, language is an East Asian language spoken by 130 million people in Japan and around 1 million people as a second language. Curiously enough, though it bears some similarities to Chinese, borrowing some Chinese characters in its written form, many linguists consider Japanese and so-called Japonic languages (most of which are considered dialects) to be a language isolate. Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Mysterious, huh?
That makes Japanese a fairly unique language as it doesn't have a definitive relative.
One important point here: Japanese does NOT belong to the same family as Chinese. What it does is it makes extensive use of Chinese characters and borrows a large portion of its vocabulary from Chinese. But the two languages are absolutely different: in grammar, in phonetics, etc. Why then adopt Chinese ways? Because when the Japanese needed a written form for their language, they turned to the closest neighbor, and a well-developed one at that, who already had a script —China.
And since the languages don't have much in common, it took a lot of changes and adaptation, which resulted in 3 scripts and Chinese hieroglyphs used in the same texts alongside Japanese symbols.
Are Chinese and Japanese hieroglyphs the same? Largely. There are various versions and differences in style, but as writing systems they are clearly extremely similar. Kanji (漢字), which literally means "chinese characters", is a Japanese pronunciation; in Chinese those ideograms are called hanzi. They do look pretty much alike, but 20-30% of the kanji used have different meanings in Japanese and Chinese.
Also, there are overwhelmingly more hanzi in Chinese than kanji in Japanese. Functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of at least 3,000-4,000 characters compared to 2,150 in Japanese.
So it is obvious that there are thousands and thousands of hanzi that never became kanji, thus are not familiar to the Japanese; but there are also a handful of kanji that were "made in Japan", NOT imported from China; and there is also that —both countries simplify characters according to domestic needs that have nothing to do with the other country.
How about visual similarity? Is it possible to distinguish between the two languages just by looking at them? Surely, the big give-away for the Japanese language will be the appearence of Japanese hiragana and/or katana in a text, which Chinese obviously won't have. Here, see for yourself!
So, as a language, Japanese ended up with these most prominent features:
- Japanese has 3 scripts, used in a mixture.
- Its writing systems are based not on letters but kanas and kanji (Chinese-based hieroglyphs).
- Each kana represents a syllable and each kanji —a word, a concept, an idea.
- Japanese pronunciation is like a steadily flowing stream, with each character sounding with equal lenght and speed.
- Since kanas are syllables, Japanese words normally have syllabic (CV) strusture and end in a vowel.
「Welcome to Japanese punctuation!」
What do you observe on this picture?
When you see Japanese texts, first thing that jumps at you is that there are no spaces between words; you see a line of symbols going one after another sometimes broken by a comma, which looks a bit different (、) from the one I use here ( , ). Also, the Japanese dot is a small circle (。) like a bagel —not a dot ( . ).
In formal texts, question mark is never used (you just put the "bagel"). How do you know it is a question? Well, because there will be this marker —か (ka)— at the end of the sentence indicating its "questioning nature", like this:
これは本です。 Kore wa hon desu. —This is a book.
これは本ですか。 Kore wa hon desu ka? —Is this a book?
In non-official and non-formal writing these days, however, the question mark is used everywhere, especially when the questions are short as in:
「マジで？」("Majide?") — "For real?"
This phrase, by the way, gives a great example of quotation marks (「」) used in Japanese (I guess, making air quotes would be a different hand gesture?). More rarely there will be double quotation marks (『』) to mark quotes within quotes, book titles or words heard through a device, like a phone.
The Japanese language is traditionally written in vertical columns from top to bottom, from right to left, but now texts are increasingly being written horizontally from left to right which was oficially accepted only in 1959 (before that all the texts were written from right to left). Since both directions are possible, some punctuation marks, like dashes, brackets, quotation marks, ellipsis, adapt to this change in direction and are rotated clockwise 90° when used in vertical text.
And what are those little symbols to the right of the kanji hieroglyphs? They are called furigana. See, you and I are not the only ones having troubles with reading kanji, the Japanese sometimes also don't know how to pronounce some of them correctly. So furigana is a hiragana spelling of kanji which is meant to help reading. It is like rōmaji for you and I when we read hiragana, katakana or kanji.
They say, Japanese grammar is simple
Is it true?
How about a quick overview of 10 most peculiar things about Japanese grammar?
Here is what you need to know:
- Japanese is a topic (or object) oriented language.
Sentences have a certain word order (which is different from English) where even a simple verb can form a complete sentence and it makes sense. A verb is normally placed at the end of a sentence. Very often the subject is excluded in daily conversations as both parties are aware of the topic and persons of conversation. - Japanese is a gender oriented language.
It has some words and some grammatical constructions that are associated with men or boys, while others are associated with women or girls. Make sure, you learned those appropriate to your gender. - Japanese is a hierarchy oriented language.
There are many honorifics, referred to as keigo (敬語, literally "respectful language"), parts of speech that show respect. Their use is mandatory in many social situations. - Japanese verbs are categorized into three groups.
By conjugation rule applied to them. The basic form of all Japanese verbs ends with "u". So you have u-verbs (or う-verbs), ru-verbs (or る-verbs) and irregular verbs (which are only 2). - Japanese verbs are not affected by their subject.
In other words, whether the subject is singular or plural, first person or second, the verbs do NOT change their form. - There are only 2 tenses in Japanese.
And they are: the Present and the Past. The dictionary form is present tense and it refers to both present and future. The context usually tells you which meaning the verb is expressing. If you feel curious to find out how simple it is to change Japanese verbs by tense, just click here. - Japanese nouns do not change based on person, number, or gender.
Thus, isha (医者) can mean 1 or many male doctors, 1 or many female doctors, or many male and female doctors. - Japanese adjectives need to be conjugated like verbs.
Although Japanese adjectives have functions to modify nouns like English adjectives, they also function as verbs when used as predicates. Therefore, they conjugate just like verbs. They are normally placed either before a noun (like in English) or at the end of a sentence if they act as verbs. All Japanese adjectives end in either "i" (い) or "na" (な) when placed before a noun.
い-adjectives and な-adjectives are conjugated differently. - Japanese doesn't have prepositions (like at, in, from, etc.).
The grammatical units with a similar function in Japanese are called particles, and they are attached to words and phrases (so they can be considered postpositions). There are about 190 distinct particle usages, and they don't all “translate” into prepositions in English. They’re also subject and object markers, conjunctions, emphasizers, and more. Particles are always written in hiragana script only. - There are many words in Japanese that sound similar but have different meanings and spellings.
These words are called homonyms. There are so many homonyms that Japanese comedians make use of them to make people laugh. But for foreigners who have just begun to learn Japanese, they are the main cause of misunderstanding! Check out this one: 箸 hashi (chopsticks), 橋 hashi (bridge).
So, I guess with 2 tenses, as opposed to 12 in English, and relatively simple verb conjugation, Japanese is possible to learn. Yet, Japanese grammar is very different from English grammar, meaning it takes time to get used to the language structure and the existence of all kinds of particles. In any case, for an "outside person" (外人, gaijin), or a foreigner, getting by in Japanese is going to be way easier than, say, in Chinese.
Of course, the quickest way to learn and speak would be not the "grammar-award-winning"-like approach, but listening and imitating the Japanese pronunciation, time and time again. And why not start with some words and phrases of interest? This is where our Langventure takes us in the next Episode. Stay tuned!
つづく.. (Tsuzuku) To be continued...
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