Learn Japanese

Japanese is easy to learn, once you have learnt the basics. On the following pages we will try to explain the basics of the Japanese language. If you find it interesting you can follow any of the links to read more, download our free Japanese dictionary or buy our Japanese software. There are many books to read in the subject, some of them you can find in the " Books " section.
 
 

Japanese is the eighth most spoken language in the world. Japanese is not a member of the Indo-European language family. In fact, Japanese is virtually the only member of the Japanese language family, considering Ryukyuan language (language of Okinawa) are not commonly used now.

The origin of Japanese is unknown, but anthropologists suppose that the majority of the ancestors of the Japanese came to Japan from north Asia through the Korean Peninsula, and mixed with the native Japanese (Ainu), who had a southeast Asian origin. Chinese have influenced Japanese, in particular through imported words, but its grammar has no relationship to Japanese.

Japanese had from the beginning no written characters or letters. The characters used today are all imported from China and in some cases altered slightly ( Like the kana ). In Japan they use mainly three different writing systems, hiragana, katakana and kanji.

Hiragana and katakana  are called "kana". It is possible to write everything Japanese with only kana characters. If you find a word in dictionary there is always a kana translation as well. On many sign etc. you can also see the kana characters. Many young people today, especially in sub cultures, do not like to use the kanji. In many manga books you can see that the entire dialogue are written with kana. Kana are also from the beginning Chinese characters. If you want to learn Japanese you have to start with learning the kana. If you know kana, the rest will be so much easier! In most dictionaries, books etc you will have to understand kana to be able to read them.

Hiragana. Are used when you can't use kanji, for sound symbolism, particles, help verb, and conjunctions. Often used also for adverb, names for animals and plants. Often you can see them together with a kanji to form a word together.

Katakana. Are used for imported words and onomatopoeic words. Foreign names are often translated with katakana.

Kanji.There are about 48.000 kanji. This is originally Chinese characters which have been imported to Japan from China. Out of those characters there is only about 5 to 10 thousand kanji characters that are used more or less frequently. To make it even easier, of those kanji character there is 1.945 kanji which are  "Jooyoo kanji". After WW2 the government in Japan decided that those kanji characters are basic. Those are the only kanji characters to be used in official writings. Finally, of those kanji characters there is only  aprox. 996 that are learnt during elementary school. The kanji characters that are used in Japan today are what Chinese refers to as " traditional characters". During the 50's when mao was at the power, he decided that the characters had to be easier to learn for farmers. China had at that time a great number of people who could not read or write. To help them they simplified many characters. The number of strokes in many characters was greatly reduced. The new characters are called simplified and the old ones traditional. Today Taiwan, Hongkong (under british rule), Japan and Korea are using the traditional Chinese characters. Mainland China use the simplified. Still, many of the characters are still the same. Not all of the characters was simplified.