ARTICLE ON JAPANESE LANGUAGE

Japanese language, a language isolate (i.e., a language unrelated to any other language) and one of the world’s major languages, with more than 127 million speakers in the early 21st century. It is primarily spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago; there are also some 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living abroad, mainly in North and South America, who have varying degrees of proficiency in Japanese. Since the mid-20th century, no nation other than Japan has used Japanese as a first or a second language.

Grammatical structure

Through the centuries, Japanese grammatical structure has remained remarkably stable, to the degree that with some basic training in the grammar of classical Japanese, modern readers can readily appreciate such classical literature as the Man’yōshū (compiled after 759; “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”), an anthology of Japanese verse; the Tosa nikki (935; The Tosa Diary); and the Genji monogatari (c. 1010; The Tale of Genji). Despite that stability, however, a number of features distinguish Old Japanese from Modern Japanese.

Syntax

Japanese syntax also has remained relatively stable, maintaining its characteristic subject–object–verb (SOV) sentence structure. A notable change in that domain is the obliteration of the distinction between the conclusive form—the finite form that concludes a sentence—and the noun-modifying form exhibited by certain predicates. For example, in early Japanese otsu and tsuyoshi were conclusive forms, respectively, of the verb ‘to drop’ and the adjective ‘to be strong.’ When these words were used as noun modifiers, the forms were inflected as otsuru, tsuyoki. The distinction between conclusive forms and noun-modifying forms played an important role in the phenomenon of syntactic concord that, for example, called for the noun-modifying forms of predicate even in concluding the predication when a subject or some other word was marked by particles such as the emphatic zo or the interrogative ka or ya. That system of syntactic concord deteriorated in Middle Japanese, and the distinction between the conclusive forms and the noun-modifying forms was also lost, the latter dominating the former. Such modern forms as ochiru ‘to drop’ and tsuyoi ‘to be strong’ are the descendants of the earlier noun-modifying forms.

Is Japanese Complicated Or Misunderstood?

Chinese, Russian, Arabic… Westerners often say a language is difficult when it doesn’t look like their own. Japanese is no exception. So is Japanese really that difficult to learn, or is it just misunderstood?Besides the challenges of the writing systems and the vocabulary that has little in common with European languages, Japanese can seem different because it uses an SOV (subject-object-verb) word order. In Japanese, you would say something like “I the bread eat” instead of “I eat the bread” (SVO, subject-verb-object). Although this might seem counterintuitive to some Westerners’ ears, there are more SOV languages than SVO languages in the world. Turkish, Farsi, Basque and Latin are other examples of SOV languages. In Japanese, the subject is often left out when it’s clear from the context, so it’s not uncommon to find a more simplified OV structure.

Nevertheless, Japanese learners can find relief in some good news on the grammar front. Japanese doesn’t have a plural, nor does it have definite or indefinite articles. Once again, context helps people figure out what is being talked about.

Among the other particularities of Japanese, it also doesn’t have specific names for months like January, February, March, etc. Instead, Japanese uses the kanji 月 (“moon,” and also “month”) with the number of the month.

Simple or complex, whatever the case, it’s the motivation that matters most. Don’t let your nerves get the better for you, because Japanese isn’t that different from learning anything else. Each language has its specific characteristics that make it difficult or easy for the person learning it.