by Sara Williams

Created on: April 22, 2009

Japanese is a language in the Altaic language family, which is very small and, surprising as it is to many, not related to Chinese in any other way except for writing. Oftentimes, a misconception is that Japanese is a very difficult language that lays on the politeness much more thickly than most Westerners are used to, but to sum up this language of the rising sun is hardly a full, accurate picture. Yes, there are Chinese characters in Japanese, and yes, Japanese grammar can be tricky, but I believe it is easier to learn than many Western languages.

Why learn Japanese? I began learning Japanese partly out of necessity (I needed two classes of a foreign language at my college) and partly for entertainment, because yes, I am a fan of anime. Part of my comic book collection includes a few books that were imported from Japan, written exclusively in Japanese. You do not need to be an anime fan to have a reason to learn Japanese, though. There are many other reasons to learn. America gets many of its cars and especially electronics, whether for good or ill, from Japanese companies, and these manufacturers often have plants and offices here in the states. Besides that, there are some very good programs, such as the government-sponsored JET, which take native English speakers and pay them to help out in English classrooms in Japan. While knowledge of the Japanese language is not necessary to work for JET or any of the public "eikaiwa" (English conversation schools), it would certainly be useful.

One of the easiest aspects of learning Japanese is actually the pronounciation. When reading Japanese that has been written in the Latin alphabet (called "romaji"), everything is pronounced exactly how it looks, and pronounciation is not changed by a word's "gender" (unlike many European languages, like Spanish or German, words have no "gender," at least not in that way) or position next to another word. The only rule to keep in mind, and where English speakers tend to screw up, is that each syllable gets equal time, and syllables have only one vowel. So, it's "tou-kyou" not "to-ki-yo" for Tokyo.

Writing is the tricky part of Japanese, and what everyone seems to get scared about. Why? There are four writing scripts, oh no! The first one is romaji, which is just Japanese written in the Latin alphabet. So, you already know romaji. Pat yourself on the back! Next there is hiragana. Hiragana each represent a sound in Japanese, each sound being a syllable, and they can be recognized

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