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The Japanese language

Japanese is spoken by 127 million people who live between Japan, the Marshall Islands, Taiwan, Palau and Guam. It doesn't belong to any other family language and it is written according to four different systems of writing: Kanji is based on the Chinese writing system and includes around 2000 signs; Hiragana is the most simple system, as it is learnt at schools and used in children literature or for simple words such as conjunctions and particles. Katakana is useful for the transcription of foreign words while Romanji is the most recent method and has been developed as a romanization of Japanese words.

When addressing someone in Japan, a distinction should be made according to our relation with the speaker: to be condescending, use "kun", while "chan" is prederred with children or relatives; "sama" is deferential and "san" is the universal mode of addressing somebody. What is more, there are two different set of phrases depending on if you are talking to a man or to a woman.

Grammar

The grammar is quite different from that of European languages: this is mainly due to the fact that Japanese doesn't belong to any other family language.

A Japanese sentence is usually divided in two separated elements called topic and subject, for instance, to say "this is Mr. Sanger", we need two different sentences, which are "kochira wa, Sanga san desu" : the particle "wa" indicates that "Kochira" is the topic, while the rest of the phrase is the comment. In English, the sentence would more or less sound like "As for this person, this is Mr Sanger", where the division into two parts is evident. Due to this peculiarity, Japanese is defined a "topic-prominent" language.

In Japanese it doesn't exist name inflection, so that there is no distinction between the singlular and the plural form of "hon" ("book"). But for some names there is a bizarre way to convey the idea of quantity: it is the so-called reduplication phenomenon, that is the repetition of the same word two times: "hito" is person, "hitohito" people.

Verbs are not going to create many problems, as there are only two tenses, past and present (which is used both for present and future actions). The other aspects are conveyed with the gerund (-te form) plus an auxiliary.

Slang

As it is for any other language, Japanese has an active and colorful slang language, which is used for communicaton between youngsters, but not only this. To express your surprise if someone arranges a "apo" (a date) with you, use "gachoon", a term which doesn't have a proper meaning, but is a nice way to communicate you are pleased. On the contrary, if you want to decline the invitation, "dame" is the right word. In reality, "dame" is the general term which expresses a "no" answer, but it can mean more things, including "it's bad" or "you can't do that". If the person insists in inviting you out, you can use "Yoseyo!", a quite strong expression meaning "Quit it!", or better, "You are bothering me!". Different from the rest of the world languages, the universal word "mama" in Japanese has a peculiar meaning, as it indicates something which is "same as usual" or is used to say "calm down".

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