Languages: Japanese 101

Lesson 1: The Japanese Language 

How many letters are there in the alphabet? Do you know how many letters there are in the Japanese alphabet? Actually, the Japanese language consists of 3 different writing systems!!! The Japanese alphabet consists of 99 sounds formed with 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) and 14 consonants (k, s, t, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, p, and n), as is shown in the chart above.

Why do the Japanese use three writing systems? The Japanese use three different systems to represent different words and meanings and to make the language clearer for the reader. Let’s look at the different types of writing: 

Kanji - 漢字

Kanji are symbols which represent a whole word. They can be quite complicated to write and often involve many strokes. Kanji came to Japan from China and are now used with the hiragana and katakana alphabets to form whole sentences. Children are expected to know around 2000 kanji characters by the time they leave school and indeed need to know this many in order to be able to read a newspaper! Children have to sit frequent kanji tests at school. 

It is sometimes quite easy to see how kanji characters developed. Look at the following kanji and try to guess their meaning. 

山 川 月

Because some kanji characters can be so difficult to write and remember, the Japanese simplified some of the symbols to form the katakana and hiragana alphabets：

Katakana - カタカナ

Katakana consists of 48 symbols, each one representing a sound. They are put together to form words, much in the same way we use the letters in our alphabet together to make words. Katakana is used for all words of foreign origin, so your name (unless it’s Japanese) will be written using katakana, many place names outside of Japan and loan words used in Japanese etc will also all be written using katakana. 

Katakana is also used for onomatopoeia – such as animal sounds etc. 

Hiragana - ひらがな

Hiragana consists of 48 symbols, each one representing a sound (the same sounds as the katakana alphabet). Hiragana is the traditional Japanese script and is used to write words of Japanese origin. Hiragana may also be used as a verb ending after a kanji character. All primary school students are expected to learn the hiragana alphabet soon after they start school. Like the English alphabet, each hiragana letter represents a specific sound and does not have any meaning per se. But unlike in English, there is only one way of pronouncing a single hiragana letter or combination of letters. For example, "e" can be pronounced many different ways in English, as in red, redo, and poorer. The hiragana though, is always pronounced as "a" in father.

Sounds -

The Japanese alphabet has fewer sounds than the English one. This means that the Japanese are unable to hear the difference between the letters ‘b’ and ‘v’ and ‘l’ and ‘r’. They also have difficulty in identifying the differences between ‘th’ and ‘s’. So, the words ‘pray’ and ‘play’ will sound exactly the same to the Japanese ear as do the words ‘berry’ and ‘very’. If you have a ‘b’,’v’,’l’ or ‘r’ in your name, how might your name be pronounced? Have a go and check with your Japanese teacher! What about if you have a ‘th’ or an ‘s’? 

Exercise:

What would you say in the following situations:

Your friend gives you an apple.
You meet a friend in the afternoon.
You come back from school.
You meet your friend in the morning.
You say goodbye to a friend.
You meet your friend's parents for the first time.
You run into a friend in the evening.
You leave the house to go to school.
You head for bed.
You accidentally bump into a friend.

Answers:

Mountain

River

Moon