Japanese is a language of the Japonic language family and it’s the native language of about 128 million people. Japanese has many similarities with nearby asian languages, especially Korean, where it shares almost the same grammar structure has very similar vocabulary, even though they are not considered to be in the same language family. Japan has quite an interesting history and a rich culture. Manga and anime are vastly popular outside of Japan, and Japan is one of the biggest exporters of electronics and pharmaceuticals. Learning Japanese is not an easy task, but it’s definitely within reach. Many people believe that it’s impossible to learn a language to a really high level after you pass a certain age, but we know that that’s not true at all. We know that while becoming a native speaker is likely impossible, reaching a near-native is certainly not. Japanese uses 4 different alphabets in day to day language use, which we will all have a look at in a bit. We can categorize these alphabets into 3 different groups: The Japanese syllabaries: Hiragana & Katakana The Chinese characters: Kanji The Latin alphabet: Romaji A syllabary is the technical term for an alphabet of syllables. Hiragana and Katakana are two separate alphabets that both consist of 50 different letters each, but the letters are pronounced exactly the same in both of them, so you can sort of compare it to having lower case and upper case letters in English. The Chinese characters were imported into Japanese more than a thousand years ago, and were imported and adapted to be used with Japanese as Japan didn’t have their own writing system at the time. The Latin alphabet is called Romaji, literally consisting of ローマ (roma) and 字 (letters), and is the same that we use in English. In everyday Japanese you will encounter all 4 of these, so it’s important that you acquaint yourself with all of them.
