Below are listed a few of the characteristic features of modern [...]]]>

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:

1. It uses a mixture of different types of characters, namely , kanji characters, hiragana characters, katakana characters, and Roman letters.
2. 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.
3. Sentences can be written either vertically or horizontally
4. 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.
5. 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”.
6. There are pronounced differences in the words and expressions used by persons of different occupation, age, sex, etc.
7. Particles are used to indicate part of speech (subject, object, etc.) and auxiliary verbs play an important role in sentence structure.
8. 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.
9. It has a complicated system of honorific expression. This topic is discussed in a term called “kei-go“.

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Kanji characters are ideograms which were brought in from China. On the basis of the Chinese and Japanese readings of these characters a system of phonetic manyogana characters was devised. This [...]]]> There are three main types of written characters in Japan: kanji, hiragana and katakana. Roman letters are also used, but to a much lesser extent.

Kanji characters are ideograms which were brought in from China. On the basis of the Chinese and Japanese readings of these characters a system of phonetic manyogana characters was devised. This in turn was simplified int the hiragana and katakana systems in about the ninth century. The characters of the hiragana and katakana systems represent single syllables. Each system presently has 46 characters.

In writing Japanses, most nouns, verb roots and adjectives are represented by kanji while the verb and adjective endings indicating the various tenses etc., auxiliary verbs and the particles are written one of the kana systems (hiragana or katakana). Adverbs can be written in either kanji or kana characters. Of the two kana systems, hiragana has by far the wider usage in modern times. Katakana characters are used mostly for spelling of loan words brought into Japanese from other languages.

The first characters taught at school are those of the hiragana system. In fact, however, a fairly large percentage of Japanses children are able to read and write kana characters even before they enter school.

All three types of Japanese characters are designed to be written in vertical lines, though they can also be written horizontally. When written vertically, the first line comes on the right of the pagae and succeding lines follow it to the left. Years ago, almost all writing was vertical but the horizontal style has gradually become  more populer since it is more adaptable to inclusion of Arabic numerals and passages in foreign languages. From the reader’s point of view, however, vertically written sentences are easier to assimilate and for this reason most newspapers, magazines and popular books are printend in this style.