The Japanese language has itw own peculiar sentence structure and writing system and has little in common with other languages of the world. Although the theory that Japanese belongs to the Atlaic and Korean family of languages is widely accepted, this has never been substantiated.
Below are listed a few of the characteristic features of modern Japanese:
- It uses a mixture of different types of characters, namely , kanji characters, hiragana characters, katakana characters, and Roman letters.
- The number of charactes used is large. About 3000 commonly used kanji characters including the 1945 daily used characters (常用漢字-jouyoukanji), 46 hiragana characters and 46 katakana characters.
- Sentences can be written either vertically or horizontally
- Having few sounds, it is phonetically simple. It has only five standard vowels: “a” as in father, “i” as in piano, “u” as in flute, “e” as in red, and “o” as in cord. Syllabels are formed by a single vowel or a consonant-vowel combination, “n” being the only consonant that can stand alone.
- The same thing or ide can often be expressed with a number of different words. For example, there are a number of words that would translate int English, as “you”.
- There are pronounced differences in the words and expressions used by persons of different occupation, age, sex, etc.
- Particles are used to indicate part of speech (subject, object, etc.) and auxiliary verbs play an important role in sentence structure.
- Aside from the restriction that the subject must come before the predicate (which come last), the speaker has considerable freedom in choosing the order of the phrases. The subject is often omitted when the meaning is clear from the predicate alone.
- It has a complicated system of honorific expression. This topic is discussed in a term called “kei-go“.
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