Japanese, The Spoken Language – Part 1 (Yale Language Series)

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Learning Japanese becomes fun and easy when you learn with movie trailers, music videos, news and inspiring talks. keiyōshi, or i adjectives, which have a conjugating ending i ( い) (such as 暑い atsui "to be hot") which can become past ( 暑かった atsukatta "it was hot"), or negative ( 暑くない atsuku nai "it is not hot"). nai is also an i adjective, which can become past ( 暑くなかった atsuku nakatta "it was not hot").

The United Nations uses six official languages to conduct business: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic Okay, so this isn’t so much of a language fact as a cultural one, but we thought it was too interesting not to include. Written records of Japanese date to the 8th century, the oldest among them being the Kojiki (712; “Records of Ancient Matters”). If the history of the language were to be split in two, the division would fall somewhere between the 12th and 16th centuries, when the language shed most of its Old Japanese characteristics and acquired those of the modern language. It is common, however, to divide the 1,200-year history into four or five periods; Old Japanese (up to the 8th century), Late Old Japanese (9th–11th century), Middle Japanese (12th–16th century), Early Modern Japanese (17th–18th century), and Modern Japanese (19th century to the present). Grammatical structure What that means is, while you can say a lot of stuff in Japanese, you also don’t give a lot of information. This isn’t too surprising when you think about it—it takes almost all eight syllables just to say “not.” The ease or difficulty of learning another language can depend on your mother tongue. In general, the closer the second language is to the learner's native tongue and culture in terms of vocabulary, sounds or sentence structure, the easier acquisition will beThere are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be underreported in favour of a national language. [6] Top languages by population Ethnologue (2023) Formerly, standard Japanese in writing ( 文語, bungo, "literary language") was different from colloquial language ( 口語, kōgo). The two systems have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until about 1900; since then kōgo gradually extended its influence and the two methods were both used in writing until the 1940s. Bungo still has some relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in bungo, although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). Kōgo is the dominant method of both speaking and writing Japanese today, although bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect. Världens 100 största språk 2010" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2010), in Nationalencyklopedin

The terminology is at times non-standard – for example, 形容動詞 are referred to as na- nominals, as they behave grammatically almost identically to 名詞 (nouns), which are clearly nominals. This choice has some support in Japanese scholarship, though traditionally these words are referred to as " na-adjectives" or "adjectival nouns". Similarly, the gender differences in spoken Japanese are referred to as blunt/gentle, rather than male/female. [1] hiragana, which is one of the first concepts Japanese learners study, owes its development to women.Tagalog and Filipino are defined as two different languages in the ISO 639 standard. Ethnologue considers that Filipino is a standardized variety of the Tagalog language with no speakers.

When it was originally conceived, katakana contained many different symbols to represent each syllable sound and was primarily used by men. Incorporating vocabulary from European languages, gairaigo, began with borrowings from Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by words from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Edo period. With the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French, and English. Today most borrowings are from English. Questions (both with an interrogative pronoun and yes/no questions) have the same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end. In the formal register, the question particle -ka is added. For example, ii desu ( いいです) "It is OK" becomes ii desu-ka ( いいですか。) "Is it OK?". In a more informal tone sometimes the particle -no ( の) is added instead to show a personal interest of the speaker: Dōshite konai-no? "Why aren't (you) coming?". Some simple queries are formed simply by mentioning the topic with an interrogative intonation to call for the hearer's attention: Kore wa? "(What about) this?"; O-namae wa? ( お名前は？) "(What's your) name?". The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands (politically part of Kagoshima), are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family; not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryūkyūan languages. However, in contrast to linguists, many ordinary Japanese people tend to consider the Ryūkyūan languages as dialects of Japanese. The imperial court also seems to have spoken an unusual variant of the Japanese of the time, [26] most likely the spoken form of Classical Japanese, a writing style that was prevalent during the Heian period, but began decline during the late Meiji period. [27] The Ryūkyūan languages are classified by UNESCO as 'endangered', as young people mostly use Japanese and cannot understand the languages. Okinawan Japanese is a variant of Standard Japanese influenced by the Ryūkyūan languages, and is the primary dialect spoken among young people in the Ryukyu Islands. [28] Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. This reflects the hierarchical nature of Japanese society. [41]

12. There are two ways to put hiragana in order

Around 200 artificial languages have been created since the 17th century. The first were invented by scholars for communication among philosophers. Later ones were developed by less scholarly men for trade, commerce and international communication. They include 'Interlingua' (a mixture of Latin and Romance with Chinese-like sentence structure), 'Ido', 'Tutonish' (a simplified blend of Anglo-Saxon English and German) and the more commonly-known 'Esperanto', invented by Ludwig Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist from Poland, in 1887 The so-called -te verb form is used for a variety of purposes: either progressive or perfect aspect (see above); combining verbs in a temporal sequence ( Asagohan o tabete sugu dekakeru "I'll eat breakfast and leave at once"), simple commands, conditional statements and permissions ( Dekakete-mo ii? "May I go out?"), etc. Japanese: The Spoken Language (JSL) is an introductory textbook series for learning Japanese. JSL was written by Eleanor Harz Jorden in collaboration with Mari Noda. Part 1 was published in 1987 by Yale Language Press, Part 2 in 1988, and Part 3 in 1990. The series differs from most Japanese language textbooks in many ways, most basically in that it focuses exclusively on the spoken language and leaves discussion of any aspect of the written language to other textbooks, such as the parallel series Japanese: The Written Language (JWL). But hey, at least you can save yourself the headache of having to learn 38,000 to 48,000 more characters. Even native Japanese speakers don’t know them all, and knowing the 2,000 most common kanji is enough to help you get through a newspaper or subtitled TV show. 19. Japanese has several grammatical features that may seem strange to non-Japanese

The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 26th edition edition of Ethnologue published in 2023. [7] Entries Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages (such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese, encompassing all their respective varieties) are not included in this section. Languages with at least 50 million first-language speakers [7] Language If you love learning Japanese with authentic materials, then I should also tell you more about FluentU. keiyōdōshi, or na adjectives, which are followed by a form of the copula, usually na. For example, hen (strange) in Japanese). Legislative Bureau of the House of Councillors. Archived from the original on 25 December 2018 . Retrieved 9 November 2012. The book is written exclusively in romaji, making no use of kana or kanji, though kana plus kanji text is available as supplementary texts. The form of romaji used is based closely on the Nihon-shiki form of romanization (which is often used in Japan), but which differs from Hepburn romanization, which is more commonly used in English-speaking countries. The romanization system attempts to follow the Japanese syllable structure to simplify grammatical relationships, rather than attempting to represent the sound. For example, ち is represented by "ti", as it falls into the たちつてと "t-" series, which is uniformly represented in JSL as ta/ti/tu/te/to, though ち is pronounced closer to English "chi" (as in "cheese"), rather than "ti" (as in "tee" or "tea"); in Hepburn these are represented as ta/chi/tsu/te/to, which are phonetically more suggestive (following standard English orthography), but obscure the Japanese syllable structure. In JSL, the text is intended only as a reference, not a guide to pronunciation, with the audio instead being the pronunciation guide.FluentU makes these native Japanese videos approachable through interactive transcripts. Tap on any word to look it up instantly. So, a Polish speaker will find it easier to learn another Slavic language like Czech than an Asian language such as Japanese, while linguistic similarities mean that a Japanese speaker would find it easier to learn Mandarin Chinese than Polish Japanese has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, with each having both a short and a long version. Elongated vowels are usually denoted with a line over the vowel (a macron) in rōmaji, a repeated vowel character in hiragana, or a chōonpu succeeding the vowel in katakana. /u/ ( listen ⓘ) is compressed rather than protruded, or simply unrounded. Modern Japanese is considered to begin with the Edo period (which spanned from 1603 to 1867). Since Old Japanese, the de facto standard Japanese had been the Kansai dialect, especially that of Kyoto. However, during the Edo period, Edo (now Tokyo) developed into the largest city in Japan, and the Edo-area dialect became standard Japanese. Since the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages has increased significantly. The period since 1945 has seen many words borrowed from other languages—such as German, Portuguese and English. [10] Many English loan words especially relate to technology—for example, pasokon (short for "personal computer"), intānetto ("internet"), and kamera ("camera"). Due to the large quantity of English loanwords, modern Japanese has developed a distinction between [tɕi] and [ti], and [dʑi] and [di], with the latter in each pair only found in loanwords. [11] Geographic distribution