Japan is one of the most developed countries in the world. Japan's population is about 125 million. About 2.5 million Japanese citizens live in Brazil, North and South America, London, Paris and New York. This is why Japanese is considered one of the most important languages in the world.
1. Learning Japanese is more difficult than other foreign languages.
The Japanese language can be a little difficult to learn, but if you are planning to visit Japan or even want to get a job at one of the large Japanese companies, then it is definitely worth the effort. In Japanese, the verb always comes at the end of the sentence. That is why it is important to listen carefully to Japanese speech in order to correctly establish the subject of discussion.
Some aspects make spoken Japanese easier than others: no noun gender, no definite article, and only 48 sounds, consisting of 5 vowels and 11 consonants. Written Japanese can be more challenging because there are 4 ways of writing, such as Kanji and Katakana. Some of these methods use Chinese characters.
2. The Japanese love tongue twisters.
The Japanese love tongue twisters. Here is one of them: "Nama mugi, nama gome, nama tamago" . It means: "Raw wheat, raw rice, raw egg" .
3. The Japanese language has its quirks.
The Japanese are famous for their politeness and are often hesitant to express their opinions. There are very few words of endearment in Japanese. This is why the Japanese take twice as long to say something.
4. Japanese is spoken in various countries.
In addition to the Japanese population, Japanese is spoken all over the world: in Brazil, the United States, South America and some Asian countries. Canada and Australia also have significant numbers of Japanese citizens, immigrants, students or temporary workers. In 2001, there were 44 Japanese in Ukraine.
5. The Japanese language has a rich history.
The history of the Japanese language goes back to the 3rd century AD. Japanese is similar to Korean, but grammatically different from Chinese. Japanese writing developed in the 18th century AD.
6. Some words in Japanese are best avoided.
Many people sometimes say "chin-chin" when raising their glass for a toast. It's better not to say this in a Japanese bar, because Japanese children use this word to describe their manhood.
7. Japanese poetry is one of the most famous uses of the Japanese language.
The most famous form of Japanese poetry is haiku. It is characterized by a rigid construction: the first line consists of 5 syllables, the second - of 7, the third - again of 5. One of the most famous haiku poems was written by Matsuo Basho:
Furu ike ya
Kavazu Tobikomu
Mizu no oto.
This poem has hundreds of translation versions. Here is the literal translation:
Ancient pond
Frog jumps in
Sound of water
8. There are several Japanese dialects.
There are many different dialects of Japanese depending on factors, the main one being geographical location. The two main dialects are Tokyo-shiki (Tokyo type) and Keihan-shiki (Kyoto type). The third, less common spoken dialect is the Kyushu type. With the development of the Internet and other media, in the process of standardization of education, a standardized dialect of the Japanese language is now in common use.
9. It is important to know the forms of address.
JAPANESE, language spoken approx. 125 million inhabitants of Japan, as well as descendants of the Japanese who migrated in the first half of the 20th century. to other countries: in the USA, including the Hawaiian Islands (more than 800 thousand), Brazil (approx. 400 thousand), Peru (more than 100 thousand), China, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, etc. Family ties of the Japanese language have long been called disputes; Now most researchers recognize it as related to the Altai languages - Korean, Tungus-Manchu, Mongolian, Turkic. There is a hypothesis about its relationship with the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) languages, however, apparently, the similarity with these languages is due to ancient contacts. During the historical period, the Japanese language was significantly influenced by the Chinese language, and in recent decades - by English.
The center of Japanese politics and culture used to be the Nara and Kyoto region, but during the Tokugawa era (1600–1867) it moved to Edo (modern Tokyo). Until the 19th century The language used as a literary language was based on the Kyoto court language of the 9th–12th centuries. In the second half of the 19th century. A modern literary language was formed on the Tokyo colloquial basis.
The Japanese language, excluding the dialects of the Ryukyu Islands, is divided into four dialect zones: Eastern (including the Tokyo area), Central Honshu, Western Honshu (including Shikoku) and Kyushu; The dialects of the Ryukyu Islands (the general name for small islands in the south of the Japanese archipelago) differ sharply from all others and are considered by some researchers as an independent language. Most Japanese use dialect forms in conversations with residents of their places, and in conversations with speakers of other dialects and in writing they use literary Japanese. The Japanese language has a rich literature that dates back more than 1,200 years; first surviving monument, chronicle Kojiki O no Yasumaro, dates back to 712.
Spoken Japanese (if new borrowings are not taken into account) has five vowels ( A, And, at, uh, O) and twenty-six consonant phonemes: n, drink, b, be, T(before at pronounced like ts), t h), d, yeah, To, ky, G, gee(the last two words inside acquire a nasal sound), With, sya(pronounced close to soft w), dz, dz(pronounced close to soft j), r, ry(single-strike, or “flapping” varieties), m, mm, n, no, X(before at pronounced like f), xx(close to the German "ich-laut"), th, V(labialial, like English w). In new borrowings from English and other languages, it is also possible V, ve(labial-dental); T And d before at; f And ts not before at; ugh, ts. The indicated features of Japanese phonetics explain the different transmission of Japanese sounds in borrowings that came directly from Japanese and passed through European languages; the same applies to the transfer of proper names: city Hiroshima, but the company " Toshiba", mountain Fuji(pit), but the company " Fuji» ( w And j at the same time, according to the rules of Russian phonetics, they are pronounced firmly, and instead of And naturally sounds s; turns out to be very far from the Japanese original); judo, But jujutsu; in some cases there is also the presence of doublet forms, cf. traditional transfer of the company name " Misubishi" and the occasional anglicized " Mitsubishi"; With " Toshiba" And " Toshiba“The situation is rather the opposite – now the second option clearly prevails. Most syllables are open; at the end of a syllable, only nasal consonants are possible; There are long vowels and consonants.
The stress in Japanese is musical. For each word, it is characterized, first of all, by the pitch of the tone and, depending on this, the number of vibrations produced by speech sounds. There are three pitch levels: low, medium and high. The distance between low and mid, as well as between mid and high, is approximately equal to a third (in musical terms). Pitch is a differential feature that can differentiate between words that are otherwise phonetically alike. Yes, word ame with tone stress on the first syllable means "rain", and the word ame, where the tone rises from low on the first syllable to medium on the second, serves as a designation for gelatin candies.
Verbs and adjectives have inflectional forms that are formed by changing endings; these forms indicate syntactic position (forms of the predicate, participle), tense, mood. Between the stem and endings there may be suffixes with the meaning of passive, causative, negation, politeness of various types, etc. Other categories of words are not subject to inflection: this includes substantives (nouns, pronouns and numerals), adverbs, postpositions, conjunctions and interjections. The usual word order in a sentence is “subject - objects - predicate” (SOV), the determiner precedes the defined. The grammatical meaning of nouns, subordinate phrases and sentences is determined by the postpositions that follow them. So, a noun followed by a postposition ha, is the subject, a noun followed by a postposition O, is a direct object. Particle placed at the end of a sentence ka turns it into an interrogative. The Japanese language has certain forms and constructions (the so-called forms of politeness) that indicate the relative hierarchy of social statuses of the speaker, the addressee and the one in question.
There are (not counting the Japanese Latin alphabet, which is not widely used) two types of writing. The first type is those borrowed from China in the 6th–8th centuries. hieroglyphs (“kanji”). Their number reached several tens of thousands, but in modern writing only approx. 3 thousand hieroglyphs. The second type is phonetic writing, the common name for all its types is “kana”. There are now two common variants of kana: hiragana (more rounded) and katakana (more angular); Hiragana and katakana independently evolved from hieroglyphs in the 9th and 10th centuries. Kana is basically a syllabic letter: a syllable consisting of a vowel and a consonant is written with one sign; the second components of long vowels, diphthongs and final syllabic nasals are written with special signs. In modern texts, hieroglyphs usually indicate the roots of full-valued words, and grammatical elements - affixes, postpositions, particles, conjunctions, as well as interjections - are written in hiragana. Katakana is commonly used to write new borrowings, mostly from English, that are not written in hieroglyphs. Regular Japanese text is characterized by a combination of hieroglyphs, katakana and hiragana characters; Special Japanese punctuation marks, Arabic numerals, and sometimes the Latin alphabet are also used. The usual direction of writing, as in China, is from top to bottom from right to left, although some scientific and informational texts are printed horizontally from left to right. The manuscript distinguishes at least three styles of writing: square (more angular), regular, and fluent (more simplified).
Even today, the book version of Japanese differs markedly from the spoken version. Many words of Chinese origin are used in writing, where they are understandable thanks to hieroglyphic notation, but are avoided in speech due to homonymy (the formal coincidence of words with different meanings). In the vocabulary and grammar of book versions of the language, words and forms borrowed from the old literary language are common. So, Ieba“if someone says” may appear in the book version in the old form iwaba. Many particles and postpositions that are lost in spoken Japanese may appear in the book: for example, instead of punishment And dake can be used in the meaning of “from” and “only” ori And nomi.
The study of Japanese in Japan has a long history; in fact, Japan is one of the few non-European countries in which a national linguistic tradition emerged and developed, reaching its highest development in the period from the late 17th to the mid-19th century; at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. this tradition came into contact with the European one. The first acquaintance of Europeans with the Japanese language occurred at the end of the 16th - beginning of the 17th century, when Portuguese missionaries settled in the country; They created the first dictionaries (1595, 1603) and the first grammar of the Japanese language (J. Rodrigues, 1604). This was followed by more than two centuries of almost complete closure of Japan to Europeans; connections were resumed only in the 1860s, when quite numerous Japanese grammars appeared, written by scholars from various European countries; By this time, Japan already had a grammar written according to Dutch models by S. Tsurumine (1833). In the 20th century the Japanese language became the object of description within the framework of new linguistic trends emerging in the West; in particular, American linguists B. Block and R. E. Miller constructed descriptivist descriptions of the Japanese language; the most complete description of Japanese grammar in the West was published by S. Martin. Theoretically important results were obtained by Japanese linguists both in Japan itself (S. Hashimoto, M. Tokieda, S. Hattori, etc.) and in the USA (S. Kuno, S. Kuroda, M. Shibatani, etc.); An interesting page in the history of linguistics and sociology was represented by the Japanese “school of linguistic existence”, which emerged at the turn of the 1940s–1950s ( cm. Also DISCOURSE). Understanding the structural features of the Japanese language had a noticeable impact on the theoretical constructions of such linguists as C. Fillmore, J. McCauley, A. A. Kholodovich, W. Chafe. Currently, Japanese studies is a large and developed branch of linguistics, which is facilitated by the modern high status of the Japanese language in the world (derived from the status of Japan as an economic superpower).
In Russia, the study of the Japanese language dates back to the 18th century, but the intensive development of domestic Japanese studies, as well as Western European studies, began with the “opening” of Japan to the outside world in the mid-19th century. The first Japanese-Russian dictionary was created in 1857 by I.A. Goshkevich, the first grammar by D.D. Smirnov in 1890. From the end of the 19th century. Regular teaching of the Japanese language began; St. Petersburg and Vladivostok became the main centers of Russian Japanese studies; Moscow was subsequently added to them. Outstanding contributions to domestic and world Japanese studies were made by E.D. Polivanov, N.I. Konrad, A.A. Kholodovich; The works of V.M. Alpatov, I.F. Vardul, I.A. Golovnin, N.A. Syromyatnikov, S.A. Starostin, N.I. Feldman are devoted to various aspects of Japanese linguistics.
(Japanese: 日本语, にほんご) is the language spoken by the Japanese and the inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago.
Belongs to the Japanese-Ryukyuan group of languages. It is the native language of almost all residents of Japan, with the exception of naturalized foreigners. Legally it does not have the status of an official language, but in fact it is one. In the Japanese education system, it is studied as the “official language”. The number of native speakers in Japan and the world is about 130 million. Ranks 9th in the world for the number of broadcasters.
The first documentary evidence confirming the existence of the Japanese language dates back to the 8th century. The Japanese language is expressed graphically by three constituent elements - two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana, as well as kanji characters. In addition, the Latin Romaji alphabet is sometimes used to convey Japanese phonemes. The Japanese language dictionary contains more than a million words. The language was heavily influenced by the Chinese language. After the Second World War, there was an active borrowing of English words.
Features of the Japanese language
Phonemes in Japanese, with the exception of consonant doubling (っ) and the phoneme "n" (ん), have open warehouses ending in vowels, and also have moras in the standard language and dialects. Stress in Japanese is tonal. Authentic Japanese words, devoid of foreign layers, are characterized by the following features:
1. Words do not begin with the sound “r”, that is, the syllabo of the column “ra” (ら行).
2. Words do not begin with voiced consonants.
3. The vowel sounds at the root of the word do not coincide with each other.
The sentence is structured according to the “subject” scheme. predicate definition." The definition is preceded by the designated word. When declensions of nouns, instead of changing the order of words in a sentence or the endings of the noun, a function word is used, a fraction-affix, which performs a grammatical function and is attached to the ending of the noun. Accordingly, in linguistic typology, based on the features of sentence structure, the Japanese language is classified as an SOV language, and based on the features of morphology, it is classified as an agglutinating language. The vocabulary of the Japanese language, in addition to authentic Japanese words, contains many borrowings from written Chinese, as well as words from European languages.
The Japanese language has grammatically and lexically rich categories of politeness, systematized into the so-called “respectful language”. Word forms have different shades, designed to ensure the appropriate level of conversation among people of different social status. The dialects of the Japanese language are divided into 3 groups and have a more detailed classification by region into subdialects and adverbs. The standard or literary Japanese language is considered to be the dialect of the middle and upper classes of the 2nd half of the 19th century, the so-called “Yamanote speech”.
The features that distinguish the Japanese language from the rest are, first of all, Japanese writing. It uses four systems - Chinese characters, the syllabic alphabets of Hiragana and Katakana, and the Latin Romaji alphabet. have dual uses - as logograms and as phonograms. The second feature is a large number of pronouns to designate a person, as well as developed honorifics and addresses. Other features are the stability of phonemes having the form “consonant + vowel”, 5 vowel sounds, the opposition of direct and palatalized sounds, the presence of 2 moras in 1 composition, a change in tone stress in compound words.
Spread of the Japanese language
The Japanese language is used primarily in Japan. Accurate estimates of the number of speakers of this language have not been carried out either on the Japanese islands or abroad, therefore, as a rule, this number is identified with the population of Japan.
In Japan, there is no direct law that would determine the status of the Japanese language as an official or state language, however, there are isolated indirect references in Japanese legislation indicating that it de facto has such a status. In particular, Article 47 of the Courts Act of 1947 stipulates that the Japanese language must be used in Japanese courts, and Articles 3 and 9 of the Law on Promoting Literary and Press Culture of 2005 specify the terms “Japanese language” and “state language” synonyms. In addition, other laws of Japan are based on the axiom that Japanese, and not any other language, is the official and state language in the country. All official texts are written in Japanese, and in Japanese schools the hours of studying Japanese are called “official language” lessons.
Outside of Japan, the Japanese language is used in America - Canada, the USA (especially in Cuba, as well as in Australia and the UK, where the Japanese diaspora lives. Mostly older residents speak Japanese. The third and fourth generations of descendants of Japanese migrants practically do not speak the language of their ancestors The Japanese language was also known and used in countries and regions under the control of the Japanese Empire before World War II - in Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Singapore, the Philippines, coastal regions of China, Sakhalin, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, the Marshall Islands in particular. In Taiwan, representatives of various indigenous non-Chinese tribes still use Japanese in private conversations, and in the Angaur state of Palau it is recognized as an official language, although there are not enough broadcasters.
Many people study Japanese abroad. In the Asia-Pacific region there are up to 2.35 million people - 900 thousand in South Korea, 400 thousand in China and 400 thousand in Australia. In general, Japanese is studied on all continents, in 120 countries. In Japan itself, the number of people studying the local language is 130 thousand, of which 100 thousand are immigrants from Asia.
Classification
The problem of classification of the Japanese language remains unresolved in world linguistics. There are several theories regarding the origin of this language and its classification. Due to the lack of agreement among scientists, Japanese is classified as an isolated language. The theory that Japanese belongs to the Altaic languages was popular in the early 20th century. Its main evidence was the presence in the Altai and Old Japanese languages of a smooth consonant, in which words do not begin with “r,” and the presence of synharmonism. However, affinities with specific languages of the Altaic group have not been determined to this day. Scientists classify Japanese as one of the Austronesian languages, citing its phonetic and lexical similarities to these languages. However, due to the abundance of assumptions and insufficient number of examples, the Austronesian theory is not able to prove the connection of this group of languages with Japanese.
In the 1980s, based on the similarities in vocabulary and grammar between Japanese and Tamil, it was hypothesized that Japanese is one of the languages of the Dravidian language family. However, these methods of constructing this hypothesis have been criticized by linguists.
The Japanese language is related to the Chinese language, from which it adopted a writing system and many neologisms. However, basic Japanese vocabulary, grammar and phonetics are very different from their Chinese counterparts, so Japanese is not classified as a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
In Ainu settlements, speech is similar to Japanese in syntax, but differs grammatically, morphologically and phonetically. This is polysynthetic speech, a phonetic structure that does not know the division into voiced and unvoiced sounds, and also has many closed warehouses. Scientists note the similarity of the basic vocabulary of the Ainu and Japanese languages, but there are not enough examples of this similarity, as well as sources to confirm the relationship of both languages. In addition, the similarity of Ainu words to Japanese is due to numerous linguistic borrowings from the Ainu.
Korean is the closest language to Japanese in terms of grammar, but has very different vocabulary. Korean phonetics is characterized by the presence of a smooth consonant and synharmonism in authentic Korean words, which is a common feature of Japanese and a number of Altai languages, but, at the same time, it has many closed warehouses and doubling of consonants, which are foreign in the Japanese language. Some researchers point to the lexical similarity between Old Japanese and Koguryo, the dead language of the horsemen of the North Korean Peninsula, but the latter hypothesis has been poorly researched, so conclusions about the connection of both languages are premature.
In the 2nd half of the 20th century, there were hypotheses about the common origin of the Japanese language with the Lepcha language and Hebrew, but they were rejected by modern linguists as pseudoscience.
The only language that is very similar grammatically, syntactically, and morphologically is the Ryukyu language, which was widespread on the Ryukyu Islands, in the south of the Japanese archipelago. Both languages are combined into the so-called Japanese-Ryukyuan language group. Depending on political or scientific preferences, Ryukyuan researchers classify this language as a separate language related to Japanese, or as a southern dialect of Japanese.
Writing system in Japan
Japanese writing uses hieroglyphs borrowed from China - kanji, two kana alphabet created in Japan - katakana and hiragana, as well as later borrowings - the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals. Each of these types of writing has its own area of application in modern writing. The exclusion of any of the above types of writing or the replacement of one with another in an unconventional way turns the text into a difficult to understand stream of information.
Japanese literature and media usually use a mixed writing style - kanji and kan. Almost all words with a certain lexical content are written in hieroglyphs, and auxiliary words are written in kans. Nouns, pronouns and numerals are written in hieroglyphs. Regarding the conjugated parts of speech (i.e., adjectives and verbs), their lexical meaning is conveyed by hieroglyphs, and the inflected part or endings is conveyed by the syllabic alphabet.
From this combination of hieroglyphs and kana, the so-called “mixed text of hieroglyphs and alphabet” (漢字かな混じり文 kanji kana majiribun) is obtained. It is the norm of modern Japanese writing, in which the main place undoubtedly belongs to hieroglyphs.
Hiragana is used primarily to write suffixes and word endings. It also publishes literature for preschool children. Hiragana is often used to make words easier to read for those who do not know the hieroglyphs. As the names of stations containing rare messages of hieroglyphs are often written in this alphabet.
Katakana is used primarily to write foreign names and foreign borrowings in general (except for borrowings from Chinese and partially Korean). In addition, katakana can be used when traditional hieroglyphic writing is replaced by kana - in the names of plants and animals. They are also used instead of hiragana to highlight a particular part of the text, such as italics, or to emphasize a particular term. Katakana is also used in the text of telegrams within Japan (however, the address is always written in hieroglyphs).
The Latin Romaji alphabet is used in international Japanese telegrams and sometimes in email. In Japan, there is a movement to abandon traditional writing and completely switch to the Latin script. There are a small number of books, newspapers and magazines that appear only in Romaji.
Direction of the letter
Traditionally, the Chinese way of writing was used - hieroglyphs-symbols were written from top to bottom, and columns (rows) were placed from right to left. This method is still widely used in fiction and newspapers. However, in scientific literature the European way of writing is more often used - from left to right, from top to bottom. This is due to the fact that in scientific texts it is very often necessary to insert foreign words and phrases, as well as mathematical, chemical and other formulas.
Officially, the horizontal letter of the European style on the left was adopted only in 1959. Before this, most texts were typed from right to left. However, even now you can find horizontal writing, the characters of which are placed from right to left. This writing is a subtype of vertical traditional writing, in which each column (row) consists of only one character.
Written speech is one of the varieties of language that coexists with spoken speech. It is believed that oral speech arises first, and written language is formed on its basis. In Japanese linguistics and the history of the Japanese language, a tradition has developed according to which written speech dominated over oral speech, i.e. living language. This tradition was followed from the introduction of hieroglyphic writing in the country to defeat in the Second World War. Today, thanks to the spread of mass media, in particular radio and television, spoken Japanese has achieved equal status with written Japanese.
Features of the written Japanese language in relation to the spoken one are:
- Writing signs play the role of an intermediary between the speaker and the addressee;
- There is a temporal and spatial gap between the speaker and the addressee;
- Expressions of politeness are optional;
- Accents and intonations are not displayed, and normalized conventional language is used instead of dialects;
- The reading of writing characters is not always consistent; there is the use of various symbols and additional marks.
The advantages of written Japanese over spoken Japanese are:
- storing messages and expressions for later eras, as opposed to oral speech;
- transmission of messages and expressions to remote places;
- the use of super-dialectical standardized conventional speech;
- displaying phenomena, things and ideas that are complex in content and essence using writing signs and graphics;
- the ease of mass reproduction of messages and expressions thanks to printing.
The disadvantages of written Japanese compared to spoken Japanese are:
- the need for many years of training to master the entire system of writing signs;
- the inability to convey the subtleties of will, feelings and mood.
As a rule, written language experiences fewer transformations than spoken language throughout its historical development. Especially in Japan, where there was a cult of writing, the written language was subject to slight changes due to the conservatism of the cultural elite. The written language was very close to the spoken language of the times of Asuka and Nara, but lagged behind the spoken language of later eras. This gap between written and spoken language was bridged in the 19th century. Modern written language reflects spoken language relatively well.
Japanese is spoken by 140 million people worldwide, with 125 million having it as their first language, making it the ninth most spoken language in the world. The true origin of the Japanese language is still a big mystery. Experts distinguish two main lexical layers in it, correlating with the Austronesian and Altaic languages, and, recently, most researchers come to the conclusion that, most likely, it was the Altaic languages that largely influenced the development and, in fact, are the ancestors of Japanese .
The Japanese language has its own written language, which combines both syllabary and ideography, a writing principle in which the unit of graphic designation is the word.
Two names of the Japanese language
The Japanese language has two names - nihongo and kokugo.
Story
The history of the emergence of the Japanese language is the subject of intense scientific debate. Adherents of the most popular theory about Altai origin believe that its formation began after the conquest of the Japanese islands by the Puyo tribes. However, it is almost impossible to trace the historical stages of the emergence of the Japanese as a nation due to the complete lack of writing before the use of Chinese characters.
Dialects
The literary Japanese language is called kyotsugo or hyojungo, which in translation means “ordinary language” and has its ancestor in the ancient Tokyo dialect, but in modern Tokyo they speak completely differently.
Writing
Nihongo is used to mean “Japanese language” to distinguish it from the list of all other languages of the world, Nihongo is the name of the Japanese language for foreigners.
Kokugo literally translates as “national language” and can mean any other language depending on the context, but without specification, it means Japanese. The word kokugo is used mainly by the Japanese themselves.
Around the 6th century BC, Japan entered into diplomatic relations with China and Korea, which served as a powerful impetus for the penetration of elements of the culture of these countries into the life of the Japanese, at the same time the first written works, mostly consisting of Chinese characters, appeared in Japan.
Over the next eight centuries, prototypes of both modern alphabets were created and most dialects appeared, the differences between which were constantly increasing.
In the 16th century, the Portuguese brought technological progress and European religion to Japan, as a result - the Japanese language was abundantly enriched with borrowings from Portuguese, which have successfully existed to this day and are still actively used, for example, arigato - the Japanese version of the Portuguese obrigado, which in translation means “thank you”, before this word appeared in the Japanese language there was no special term for expressing gratitude.
During the same period, the first printing press was brought from Korea to Japan, which contributed to the emergence of printed publications, the rapid development of literacy among the Japanese and smoothing out the differences between the huge number of Japanese dialects.
In 1603, the Japanese ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu banned the practice of Christianity and declared Japan a closed country, prohibiting the population from maintaining relations with representatives of other countries, with the exception of traders from Holland, after which there were no fateful interventions in the development of the Japanese language from outside.
In the northeast of the island of Honshu, the Tohoku-ben dialect is used, which the Japanese call the lazy language due to the peculiarities of pronunciation. Tohoku-ben is so different from all other Japanese dialects that ordinary Japanese have to use subtitles to watch films made in northeastern Honshu.
The dialect of the inhabitants of Hokkaido, Hokaido-ben, is similar in many ways to both literary Japanese and Tohoku-ben. Its main differences are the reduced importance of separating words by gender and the abundant use of abbreviations.
We have given only three examples, however, in the territory of modern Japan there are so many different dialects that many books and studies are devoted to this issue. Dialects mix with each other, borrow lexical norms and pronunciation features from each other and form new and new subtypes. The population of various prefectures speaks special dialects inherent in these areas, both similar to literary Japanese and with a large number of original language norms.
The three main components of Japanese writing are kanji, hieroglyphs borrowed from the Chinese language, and two syllabaries that appeared in Japan itself: katakana and hiragana.
Katakana is used mainly to convey in writing words borrowed from other languages, so, for example, the word Russia in writing will look like this: rossia. Katakana does not accurately convey the original sound of words, which is due to the peculiarities of the phonetics of the Japanese language. Another use of katakana is to highlight part of printed text, just as in Russian we use bold or italics for these purposes.
Hirogana is most often used to write suffixes, as well as words in the Japanese language that do not have special hieroglyphs to indicate them, in addition, all names of Japanese railway stations are written using hirogana.
The classic Japanese way of writing texts is in columns of characters running from right to left, with the characters in the columns written from top to bottom. This method was used everywhere until 1959, when the Western method of horizontal writing from left to right was officially approved. However, Japanese fiction and some periodicals still use the traditional typesetting method.
Teacher's advice:
Learning a foreign language becomes easier when you practice it a little every day. Each language has its own special sound. The more you listen to the language, the easier it becomes. Reading helps strengthen your grammar and your vocabulary, so read every day. It doesn't matter if you listen to the news or music, or read a book, magazine or website, the most important thing is a little bit every day.
Learning a language becomes easier when you practice a little every day. Every language has a different sound and the more you listen the easier it gets. Reading improves your grammar and vocabulary so read a little every day too. It doesn't matter if you listen to the news or music, or read a book, magazine or website, the important thing is to a little every day.
One of the features of the historical development of Japan is its long isolation, which lasted until the middle of the 19th century. This has had a noticeable effect on the Japanese language: linguists are still not sure where it originates from. The theory of its relationship with the Altai group of languages is more popular; another version leans towards Austronesian languages, represented in particular in Southeast Asia and Oceania.
1. Japan is a small country, but very densely populated. Thanks to this, the Japanese language (“Nihongo”), according to data for 2009, is in 9th place in the world in terms of the number of people who consider it native - 125 million. Its immediate neighbors are: in 8th place - with 167 million original media, in 10th place - with just over 100 million.
2. The mountainous landscape and island location of Japan in the past made communication between different regions of the country very difficult. Because of this, more than two dozen dialects arose in the Japanese language. And the dialects of the southern Ryukyu Islands are generally distinguished into a separate Ryukyu language. The dialects are so different from each other that their speakers often would not understand each other - if not for the compulsory study of literary Japanese in all schools in the country.
3. The sound of the Japanese language can be very unusual for the Slavic ear. One of the reasons for this is that in Nihongo there are practically no separate consonant sounds; syllables are used instead. For example, one of the jokes in the style of “You are too keen on Japanese if...” reads: “... if you think for a long time about how many syllables are in the word “tractor”.” In fact, a Japanese person without special training will read this word as “torakuturu”. The only “pure” consonant is “n”.
At the same time, the Japanese in many cases “swallow” the vowel sounds “u”, “i”. For example, the word "moon" - 月 ("tsuki") - is usually pronounced "ts'ki".
4. In addition, there is no “l” sound in Japanese. In foreign words it is replaced with “r” - for example, “teresukopu” (telescope). This "r" is one of the most striking features of the Japanese accent. Which, by the way, was successfully used by the American Marines in the Pacific during World War II: a word like “lollapalooza” could not be pronounced correctly by any enemy spy, which made such words very convenient for use as passwords.
5. However, there are also difficulties in transmitting some Japanese sounds in other languages. For example, the sound of the syllable し is something between “si” and “shi”, じ - between “ji” and “ji”. As a result, linguists from different countries use different rules for expressing Japanese words in writing. For example, the word 地震 (earthquake), according to Polivanov’s system adopted in Russian, will be written as “jisin”, and according to Hepburn’s English system - “jishin”. The situation is aggravated by the above-mentioned abundance of dialects: in different regions the pronunciation can be either very loud (“dzi”) or muffled (“ji”).
6. Many are sure that the Japanese, like the Chinese, use hieroglyphs to write. This is only partly true: along with hieroglyphic writing, there are two alphabets in the Japanese language - hiragana and katakana. However, characters (kanji) are still the main way of writing today. They came from China, and many retained their original meaning. Thanks to this, a Japanese and a Chinese, without knowing each other’s languages, are quite able to communicate with each other in writing - not without misunderstandings, of course, but still.
7. The largest dictionary of the Japanese language contains 50 thousand characters. At the same time, the standard for a Japanese high school graduate is knowledge of about 2 thousand hieroglyphs; and in order to read a book or a daily socio-political newspaper without any difficulties, you need to remember about 2.5 - 3 thousand characters.
8. The syllabaries hiragana and katakana (united under the general term “kana”) play a supporting role. Hiragana is used in particular to write suffixes and Japanese words for which there is no character. It can also be used instead of hieroglyphs by those who do not know the language well - for example, children or foreigners. Katakana is used mainly for borrowed words. For example, the above-mentioned “tractor” came into Japanese from English and is written as トラクター (“torakuta”, from the English pronunciation).
9. By the way, about borrowing. In Japanese they are called “gairaigo”, and there are many such words, mostly from (although this is not limited to). For example, classmates may be called “kurasumeto”, from the English “classmate”, and one of the simplest types of housing - a specific one-room apartment - is designated by the word “apato”, from “apartment”. The word “baito” (from Arbeit, “work”) comes from the German language, meaning part-time work (by the way, as in); There are many borrowings from the Germans in medical vocabulary. The word “tabaco” (tobacco) was given to the Japanese by the Portuguese, and “ikura”... yes, yes, it’s Russian “caviar”.
Many borrowed ones were so modified that it is very difficult to recognize them. For example, the Japanese call a personal computer “pasokon” (distorted “perso-com”), and local truckers drive around in decorated trucks called “dekotora” (from “decorated truck”).
Decorators in their natural habitat.
Interestingly, gairaigo is often used in cases where the word has a native analogue: for example, a wife can be called “waifu”, in the same English manner.
10. Restraint is considered a characteristic feature of the Japanese national character. This is also noticeable in the language. For example, the traditional address of a husband and wife to each other is “anata”. This is the same word that means “you/you” when addressing a stranger; the fact that the address here is personal and means “dear/darling” is clear only from the context. The word “s’ki” can mean both love between a man and a woman, and the feeling from the series “I like kittens.” However, there are several more terms for love: “ai”, “aijo” means burning passion, “koi” is used only if the feeling is mutual, and even the tracing paper from English love - “slave” - is also found in speech.
11. Another feature of Japanese society, reflected in the language, is a strict social hierarchy. In Nihongo, there is a whole range of suffixes added to names depending on who the person is to the speaker; some of these suffixes are related to personal relationships, others to professions.
An example for clarity. A young Japanese man named Yamazaki Ryuji (the first word is a surname, the second is a given name) works as a teacher at a high school:
- Homeowner, bank clerk, etc. they will call him "Yamazaki-san".
- Students and colleagues - "Yamazaki-sensei" (sensei literally means "teacher", and in this case the word is used as a suffix).
- Friends and buddies - "Yamazaki-kun".
- A fellow student at the institute who entered a year later is “Yamazaki-senpai” (“senpai” means “senior”, is also used as a separate word).
- Close friend - by first name or last name, without a suffix.
- Favorite girl - "Ryuji-chan" (or even "Ryu-chan").
And these are just the simplest examples; there are a great many nuances.
12. It’s not easy to speak in Japanese not only about other people, but also about yourself and your loved one. Our “I” in Japanese corresponds to many different words, which also depend on the context of the situation and the personal characteristics of the speaker. The most neutral form - the literary "watashi" - is acceptable for any person, but if you lengthen it to "watakushi" ("watak'shi") - and we get a purely female version, and a very mannered, aristocratic one. Purely masculine forms are “boku” and “ore”, with the first being only slightly familiar, and the second being considered boastful and used to emphasize one’s own “coolness”. There are other, rarer and more specific options.
13. Negation in Japanese is usually placed at the end of a sentence (in this way, by the way, it is similar to German). In fact, the speaker only needs to add the negation “nai” at the end of the tirade - and the whole meaning of what was said changes to the opposite.
14. The Japanese consider 4 to be the unluckiest number. Moreover, in Japan they fear it even more than in the West they fear the number 13. For example, in numbering floors, hospital wards, etc. they try to avoid not only the number 4 itself, but also combinations ending in four - 14, 24, etc. And on the 4th of every month, the number of deaths from cardiovascular diseases increases noticeably (however, there is no mysticism here - people are nervous about the “unlucky” day). A similar superstition appeared due to the peculiarities of the language: the original reading of the Chinese character 四, denoting the number “4”, is very similar to the sound of the word “death”.
However, in fairness it must be said that the fear of the four is characteristic not only of Japan, but also of other countries that use Chinese writing - in particular, China itself, as well as Korea. For example, the photo above was taken in Hong Kong.
15. There is no future tense for verbs in Japanese. At all. There is only the past and the non-past (present). That is, for example, the phrases “I’m going to the store” and “I’ll go to the store” will sound the same in Japanese. The specific meaning is inferred from context or specifications (“I’ll go to the store at three o’clock”).
By the way, they like to cite this fact as proof of the conservatism and traditionalism of Japanese society: they say, even in the language they did not provide for the future tense.
P.S. Not exactly a fact, more like a historical anecdote. After the end of World War II, the Americans decided to analyze all the factors of victory over the Japanese in the Pacific. And, among other things, they allegedly discovered that the average length of a word in English is 5 sounds, and in Japanese - 13. That is, roughly speaking, while the Japanese are still in command, the Americans are already shooting. This may, of course, be fiction. However, today's Japanese fighter pilots use English in radio communications.
