Japanese language - origin and distinctive features

Japanese as an official language

Despite the fact that the national language in Japan is Japanese, this is not stated either in the country’s Constitution or in other official documents. However, for local residents this goes without saying and does not require confirmation. As of 2021, the country is home to 126 million people, the vast majority of whom know Japanese at school level. Moreover, we are talking not only about phonetics and grammar - both in public and private schools, children are also taught calligraphy.

Of course, the official language of Japan cannot be called easy to learn - in the United States it was even recognized as the most difficult, because just to master the alphabet and counting system, a migrant will have to spend about a year. However, the Japanese note that many foreigners who diligently study hieroglyphs, after a few years begin to understand the language even better than the average local resident.

What dialects are common in Japan?

In the Land of the Rising Sun, there are different dialects that differ slightly from the standard language. The spread of different variants of the dialect leads to the fact that, for example, a native resident of the island of Hokkaido may simply not understand a resident of Nagasaki. Therefore, when meeting Japanese living in different parts of the country, they speak the generally accepted Japanese literary language, which was officially approved by the state.

Speaking about what languages ​​are spoken in Japan, it should be noted that the most common dialects are:

• Hakata (dialect of Fukuoka city and surrounding area);
• Osaka dialect;
• Kamigata (a dialect of Kyoto, sometimes combined with Osaka);
• Hiroshima dialect;
• Nagoya dialect;
• Sendai dialect;
• dialect of Hokkaido island.

Japanese dialects mainly differ in pronunciation, the need to use particles, as well as the number of word forms inherent in a particular style of speech (official business, colloquial, etc.).

In some regions of the country, news and TV shows are broadcast in “native” dialects. In addition, these adverbs are actively used in cinema.

Letter

The Japanese writing system can be traced back to the 4th century AD. BC, when Chinese writing was introduced to Japan through Buddhism, as Japan adopted Chinese cultural practices and reorganized its government according to the Chinese administrative structure.

Because Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) could not represent all the elements of the Japanese language, two syllabary systems of about 50 syllables each, called hiragana and katakana, were created in the 12th century. Today, Japanese is written with a mixture of kanji, hiragana, katakana, and katakana. Additionally, rōmaji (Roman script) is also used.

• Kanji is used to write nouns, including proper nouns, and the stems of adjectives and verbs;
• Hiragana is used to write inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs, various grammatical particles, words for which there is no kanji, and some high-frequency words;
• Katakana is primarily used to write loanwords;
• Rōmaji is used to write Arabic numerals, international units of measurement, and abbreviations. The Internet has accelerated the spread.

The center of Japanese politics and culture used to be the Nara and Kyoto region, but during the Tokugawa era (1600–1867) it moved to Edo (modern Tokyo). Until the 19th century The language used as a literary language was based on the Kyoto court language of the 9th–12th centuries. In the second half of the 19th century. A modern literary language was formed on the Tokyo colloquial basis.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the combination of the three Japanese scripts and in the romanization (rōmaji).

Article 1 All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Other popular languages ​​in Japan

Most Japanese schoolchildren begin to learn at least one foreign language, mainly English, at the age of 12. Moreover, teaching English as a foreign language in Japan quite often becomes the work of migrants. This happens because in this country it is difficult to get the job of your dreams, so many visitors, faced with high competition, forced to pay for housing or study at a university, take temporary jobs as teachers in private schools or language courses.

The popularity of migrant teachers is due to the fact that the Japanese are not particularly inclined to learn foreign languages.

Of course, every school graduate knows at least 2,000 words in English and will be able to carry on a conversation, but in principle, the average Japanese does not really need English (like French or German) and is quickly forgotten after school.

Many people interested in Eastern culture wonder how widespread the Chinese language is in Japan. It would seem that both countries use hieroglyphs; moreover, the Japanese once adopted them from the Chinese. However, at the moment these languages ​​are radically different: the alphabet, pronunciation features, and vocabulary are different. Therefore, the Chinese language in Japan is poorly spoken (mainly among employees of international companies and migrants from China themselves).

Grammar

Nouns

• Japanese nouns are not indicated by number or gender. If necessary, the number can be expressed by specifying the quantity or adding a suffix. In a small number of native Japanese words, plurality can be expressed by reduplication, for example, yama 'mountain', yamayama 'many mountains'.
• There are no articles.
• The grammatical functions of nouns are indicated by postpositions, often called particles:

Pronouns

Japanese does not have true pronouns like Indo-European languages. Rather, there is a subset of nouns called daimeishi, which, unlike true pronouns, take modifiers and do not constitute a closed class (new daimeishi may be added and old ones may fall into disuse). Personal daimeishi are rarely used because Japanese sentences do not always require explicit subjects, and because names or titles are often used where pronouns would appear in Indo-European languages ​​such as English.

Verbs

Japanese adds suffixes to stems to represent different forms of verbs.

• There are six bases: imperfect, continuous, finite, attributive, hypothetical and imperative.
• Verbs have two tenses: past and non-past, and the difference between present and future is not marked in the conjugation.
• Voice and aspect are indicated by conjugation.

Syntax

The usual word order in Japanese is subject–object–verb. The verb must always come at the end, even if other components of the sentence may be rearranged. The basic sentence structure of a Japanese sentence is the topic comment. The particle wa is attached to various sentence components to actualize them.

Language courses

As already mentioned, Japanese is considered one of the most difficult languages ​​to learn, but this does not mean that trying to master it is useless. According to statistics, there are at least 15 million people in the world who have learned Japanese on their own as a hobby. Many people were prompted to do this by their acquaintance with Japanese cinema and anime.

And yet, if you are going to approach language learning thoroughly, it is better to do it in a special institution in Japan. Fortunately, there are many language schools in the state, as well as training programs. You can find a group based on:

• planned length of stay in the country (from 14 days to two years);
• age (there are courses for schoolchildren, students, adults, pensioners);
• city ​​of residence and financial opportunities (in Tokyo, school classes and rent for living space will cost almost twice as much as in the outback).
  By the way, if you are going to enroll in a Japanese university, it is better to “get a job” at a school at one of the universities to which you plan to apply. In this case, they will help you master not just the language, but also professional terminology.

Structure

Japanese has a simple syllabic structure consisting of a consonant + vowel.

Vowels

Standard Japanese has five vowel phonemes, which are sounds that have meaning in the meaning of a word. Vowels can be short or long. The length of vowels affects the meaning of words, for example ojisan 'uncle' and ojiisan 'grandfather'. Other Japanese dialects may have as few as three or even eight vowel phonemes.

• /u / is not rounded, rather the lips are pressed together, leaving space between them for air to escape. It is pronounced like the close back unrounded vowel [ɯ].
• The vowels / i / and / u / are pronounced in silent environments, for example kutsu 'shoe'.

Consonants

The Japanese language has a very small supply of consonants. The consonant phonemes are listed below. A notable feature of the Japanese language is that the dental consonants /t/, /d/, /s/, /z/ undergo regular mutations before the front vowels /i/ and /u/.

• /s/ is pronounced as [ʃ] before i and as [s] elsewhere.
• /z/ is pronounced as [dʒ] before i, as [dz] before u, and as [z] in other places.
• /t/ is pronounced as [tʃ] before i, as [ts] before u, and as [t] in other places.
• /d/ is pronounced as [dʒ] before i, as [dz] before u, and as [d] in other places.
• /r/ sounds like a cross between [r] and [l]. It is performed by placing the tip of the tongue lightly at the back of the upper teeth.

Morae

Most dialects, including Standard Japanese, use morae as their base sound system rather than syllables. The Japanese syllable-final n is moraic, as is the first part of the double consonant. For example, the word Nippon 'Japan' has four morae ni + p + po + n, although it only has three syllables. The number of characters in the hiragana orthography of a word reflects the number of morae. This structure is superimposed on loanwords, causing the one-syllable English word strike to become a word with four morae su + to + rai + ku in Japanese.

The rules for tone shape differ somewhat from dialect to dialect.

A little about life in Japan

Since Japan is considered one of the most closed countries in the world, migrants from any country will have to get used to the peculiarities of the local mentality for a long time. However, this concerns immigrants from the CIS to a lesser extent. Local residents in Japan study Russian at institutes and universities, which is caused, among other things, by their territorial proximity to the Kuril Islands, and in principle they are very friendly towards the Slavs.

Still, if you come to Japan and join its diaspora, you will have to get used to the typical Japanese lifestyle. It should be taken into account that local residents are extremely polite, but at the same time reserved people, who value stability most of all in everything - from career to personal life.

Unknown origin

Explaining this by the fact that China, Japan and Korea are geographically located very close, uninformed people often confuse the three countries, believing that their culture is almost identical . However, this is not entirely true: although the Korean language is indeed created on the basis of Japanese, Japanese is so unique that linguists still do not know which language group it can be classified into. It began its development in the 6th century, thanks to the Yamato who inhabited the territory of modern Japan.

Unusual sound

Japanese sounds unusual for a Russian person due to the peculiarities of word construction . Thus, the only consonant that can stand alone, without a vowel, is “n,” while the rest require the mandatory creation of a syllable, and therefore always stand next to vowels. The Japanese also pronounce the vowels “i” and “u” quite clearly, but do not pronounce “l” at all. In those foreign words where this letter is present, it is replaced with “l”. By the way, Japanese is similar to Russian in the absence of diphthongs - double, predominantly vowel sounds that are often found in English.

In addition, Japanese is the fastest in the world . The average Japanese speaker pronounces more than 7 syllables per second ! For comparison: the speed of English is only 6 syllables per second.