The Japanese language is a fascinating language. And though lots of people get intimidated by it, in reality, it is really not that bad.
The only thing that kind of throws people off Kanji – the writing system with the Chinese characters. When people come across it, they think that is kind of hard. But what people don’t realize is that it is not like Chinese, where the language is written in all symbolic characters. In Japanese language, Kanji is used for a few symbolic words and that’s it.
Below, you will find a couple of fun facts about the Japanese language that you probably didn’t know about.
1. Hiragana
It is the basic Japanese phonetic alphabet that is used for native Japanese words. Moreover, it represents every sound in the Japanese language. And there are a total of four different writing systems in Japan; Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and Romaji.
2. The Japanese language is really easy to pick up
Just like how it is in the Latin vowels, there are only a total of five vowel sounds in the Japanese language, which explains why it is very easy to master the language. Every other character is a consonant followed by a vowel or it is just a vowel by itself.
Or sometimes there is just one character which is the only continent or that stands by itself. That makes it one of the fastest spoken languages in the world. You can speak 7.84 syllables per second in the Japanese language as compared to English which can be spoken at 6.19 syllables in one second.
3. Katakana is used foreign words
The Japanese language borrows a ton of different words from English and lots of other languages. This makes the language really fun to learn because sometimes they will have really interesting takes on the English language; like the fact that some of the words are exactly the same. For instance, how the English word ‘pen’ is pen in the Japanese language. Just like how the word ‘beach’ is beach in Japanese as well.
The only difference is in the spellings of the words e.g. Coffee is Koh-he or beach is Bee-Chee; or the pronunciation of the words. You will just be saying the English words with the Japanese accent.
4. Japanese have a different sentence order.
In the English language, the common sentence structure is subject-verb-object, however, it is not the case with Japanese as it is subject-object-verb; which means in essence that if you were to take a sentence you would say the first part of it the same way you would say in English; this the subject and then you would say the rest of the sentence backwards.
For example in English, you would normally say that ‘Jimmy eats an orange.’ But in Japanese, you would instead say that ‘Jimmy an orange eats.’
This seems like the biggest kind of struggle to get over but once you get used to it, it is really not that bad and can even be fun during the learning process.
5. Most words have two roots of pronunciations
One of the pronunciations is in Japanese and the other one is in Chinese; hence, by learning the Japanese language, you would be able to learn the two languages simultaneously, Japanese and Chinese.
So, you are technically getting the best of both worlds as you are not only picking up a language that you are interested in but also mastering one that is widely spoken globally.
Japanese culture has been one of the oldest and richest in history, so you should definitely learn the language to get immersed in the culture and fully understand the beauty of it. Many institutions in Singapore offer some of the best Japanese classes and courses. If you are truly inspired by the language then you should get yourself registered immediately.
