Learn Japanese
Japanese ranks as one of the world's most important languages with over 126 million speakers. The vast majority, about 124 million, reside within Japan and the island group of Okinawa. Another two million (est.) live in the United States, Canada and Australia, or areas where Japanese have immigrated. Millions of additional near-native Japanese speakers live in other parts of Asia.
 There has been a significant increase in the numbers of people learning Japanese over the past three decades. Most recent figures suggest 2.3 million people studied Japanese worldwide in 2003: Of these 900,000 were South Koreans, 389,000 Chinese, 381,000 Australians, and 140,000 Americans who learned Japanese at educational institutions across the country.
With the increasing global importance of Asia and the Pacific Rim, and the economic and strategic significance of international Japanese relationships, it is of significant importance that more people learn Japanese.
The importance of Japan in a global context means that knowledge of the Japanese language and culture benefit those in a variety of different fields such as tourism, journalism, science, technology, humanities and social sciences. A growing awareness of this fact has led to a great increase in the numbers students who are learning Japanese.
Japanese Language History
The history of the Japanese language is uncertain and evidence supports various theories. However, linguists agree that it is one of the two members of the Japonic language family, but remain divided as to the origins of the Japonic languages. An older view, still held by many non-specialists, is that Japanese is an isolated language. However, because the Japonic family consists of two known members, Japanese and Ryukyuan, that analysis may be inaccurate.
 The genetic connection of the Japonic family is unknown. Several theories have been suggested associating Japanese to a wide selection of other languages and language families, including extinct languages spoken by historic cultures of the Korean Peninsula; the Korean language; the Altaic languages; among many others. It has been suggested that Japanese combines more than one of these, and is therefore a Creole language. To date, no one theory is widely regarded as being correct and the debate is set to continue until more evidence is discovered.
Japanese Language Facts
- Aspects of Japanese language include the following: no verb conjugation; no gender of nouns; no articles (a, an, the); number (singular and plural) are not important and barely exist; there are only 48 sounds consisting of 5 vowels and 11 consonants; syntax, or the word order of a sentence, excepting the final verb, is totally free
 The written language has 3 methods of writing: thousands of Chinese characters called Kanji and 2 Japanese syllabic scripts of 48 characters each called Hiragana and Katakana. Because of this, Japanese is considered the most complex written language in the world.- Many words have two very different roots of pronunciation, a Chinese root and a Japanese root.
- Japanese does not have the tones that Chinese uses. Japanese pronunciation of a word is multi-syllabic, whereas the Chinese way is a monosyllable.
- In Japanese, the main verb comes at the end of the sentence. This can make the meaning of a long sentence hard to grasp.
- Particles follow nouns, denoting their usage. This is often difficult for foreigners to learn unless they happen to be Korean or Mongolian.
- Tokyo and Sapporo are considered the two main centers of the standard national language, but all other areas have their unique accents and even different words. Osaka’s accent is one of the most recognizable.
- The majority of Japanese perople cannot or will not say, "I love you". These words are present in Japanese, but do not form part of daily vocabulary.
- In the Japanese language, it takes about twice as long to say something compared to English. English song lyrics are cut in half when translated into Japanese in order to keep the same rhythm.
Visit this page for information on learning Japanese in Japan.
The content of this page is original and is copyright of Languages in Action. It has been researched and adapted from several respected sources of Japanese language information such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language.
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