Japanese Dictionaries

Japanese language is spoken by over 125 million people world over and is mostly spoken by people of Japan. You can also find people in some parts of Taiwan, Korea, United States, Brazil, etc. Japanese has not yet been defined in relation to any family of languages but some do believe it has proximity with Korean language when it comes to grammar.


Origin


The earliest reference to a Japanese language was found in a Chinese document in around 8th century. It is believed that in the late 3rd A.D and early 4th A.D, the Japanese started adopting the Chinese script via Korea and evolved their writing which was until then non-existent. However, the Chinese script failed to meet the requirements of writing in Japanese as the Japanese language is highly phonetic. It was around and after 8th century that new phonetic syllabaries were introduced in the language.


The oldest written form of Japanese was found in around 8th century and is often referred to as “old Japanese”. Since then numerous changes have been introduced in the language but it hold the same essence as the old Japanese.


Pronunciation


The learning to speak Japanese language is bit difficult. This is because of the few sound deviations they have. The language is known to have very few sounds and is also full of homonyms. Homonyms are words that sound the same but have different meanings. Accent also makes it difficult to learn the language easily.


Grammar


The Japanese grammar is very simple to learn because of its lack of many grammar essentials. For example, there is no singular or plural in it. Moreover, even if they speak according to gender, even the line dividing gender is blurred when it comes to grammar.
This can be quite surprising for a beginner. Furthermore, even the verbs are used at the end of the sentence unlike other languages.
Another interesting feature of their grammar is that they would prefer sentences to be shorter. The use of pronouns is omitted mostly thanks to their likeness for shorter sentences. They would omit the reference to the object if it is understood.


Writing


The writing system of Japanese language mainly consists of three different character sets. They are kanji (this adopts the Chinese language in a major way), hiragana and katakana.
Hiragana and katakana are adaptations of the kanji and have evolved as the two major character sets used in the writing.
The writing in Japanese is done either in the old Japanese way where it is written in vertical columns from right to left or following the traditional style where the horizontal top to bottom is done. Both of these writing styles are existent today.