United States Foreign Service Institute
   Beginning Japanese I

Learn Japanese - Speak Japanese

Japanese ranks as one of the world's most important languages with over 126 million speakers. Of these, the vast majority, about 124 million, reside within Japan and the island group of Okinawa. Another two million or so live in the United States, Canada and Australia, areas where Japanese have immigrated or moved temporarily for business purposes. Millions of additional near-native or otherwise fluent speakers of Japanese reside within Korea, China, or other parts of Asia. Many of these people acquired Japanese during Japan's military operations both before and after World War II. There has been a great surge of interest in the study of Japanese as a second language throughout the past 30 years, due to the Western world's fascination with Japanese culture, as well as to Japan's status as a world economic power.

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About The Foreign Service Institute

As any seasoned vacationer, jet-setting businessman, soldier, diplomat or weekend warrior will tell you, traveling to a foreign country is a truly exhilarating experience. From the moment you first set foot on foreign soil, you're surrounded by a new, exotic world, full of unique sights, sounds, tastes and adventures. Your senses are in overdrive as you feel both excitement about what awaits you, and anxiety about adhering to local laws and customs. It is at this moment--when you desire to make the very most of this experience--that you realize your true barrier to this new world is not a cultural one, but rather one of basic communication. Learning the local language can be the difference between frustration and relaxation on a vacation. It can spell success or failure in a business meeting. It can help insure a safe, fulfilling and enlightening trip for virtually anyone, anywhere. The family of language courses assembled by Learn How To Speak.com is the answer.

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About the Japanese Language

The origin of Japanese is in considerable dispute amongst linguists. Evidence has been offered for a number of sources: Ural-Altaic, Polynesian, and Chinese amongst others. Of these, Japanese is most widely believed to be connected to the Ural-Altaic family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, and Korean within its domain.

Korean is most frequently compared to Japanese, as both languages share significant key features such as general structure, vowel harmony, lack of conjunctions, and the extensive use of honorific speech, in which the social rank of the listener heavily affects the dialogue. However, pronunciation of Japanese is significantly different from Korean, and the languages are mutually unintelligible.

Japanese has an extremely complicated writing system, consisting of two sets of phonetic syllabaries (with approximately 50 syllables in each) and thousands of Chinese characters called "kanji", approximately 2,000 of which the Ministry of Education has designated as required learning before high school graduation.

The adaptation of Chinese characters during the sixth to ninth centuries A.D. was the most important event in the development of the language. By the 12th century, the syllabic writing systems, "hiragana" and "katakana", were created out of "kanji", providing the Japanese new freedom in writing their native language. Today, Japanese is written with a mixture of the three: "kanji", "hiragana", and "katakana".

Since the mid 18th century the Japanese have adopted a huge amount of "gairaigo": foreign words mainly from English. These include "teburu" (table), "biru" (beer), "gurasu" (glass), "aisu" (ice), "takushi" (taxi) and "hoteru" (hotel).

There are also a few words from Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish, such as "pan" (bread) and "arigato" (thank you), from the Portuguese "pão" and "obrigado". Such words arrived in Japan mainly during the 16th and 17th centuries, when missionaries and merchants started to visit the country.

Japanese Reference Links

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