The Japanese Language

The Japanese language is a unique one, having been said to be one of the most difficult languages to learn to speak fluently. While it's true that it isn't easy to learn Japanese, neither is it easy to learn any other language, especially our native English. Typically when learning a language there are those who go through their studies of its grammar and insult the language by saying that a certain structure is backward or an unintelligent way to do things when compared to English. The fact is that even English has its oddities and insensible constructions and will be given their due attention throughout the rest of this essay.

The Japanese language consists of relatively few sounds and doesn't pose much of a problem as far as the pronunciation of words for learners. (Japan-guide.com) The written language consists of kanji which were brought over from China and 46 characters in both hiragana and katakana. Out of the thousands of kanji that exist in China today, only 1,945 are governmentally approved for use in Japan and are called jouyou kanji. Hiragana and katakana are known together as simply "kana" and are called syllabaries, not alphabets. As the word would have you believe, a syllabary is a collection of characters which form the syllables of a word instead of the individual sounds that alphabets make up. The difference between the two syllabaries is that hiragana is used for spelling out words that do not have kanji assigned to them and for verb endings and sentence particles. Katakana are mainly used to spell words of foreign origin, foreign names, company names, and new Japanese words.