Japanese - The Rough Guide to Tokyo - page 257

Japanese
Picking up a few words of Japanese is not di cult. Pronunciation is simple and
standard and there are few exceptions to the straightforward grammar rules.
With just a little effort you should be able to read the words spelled out in
hiragana and katakana , Japanese phonetic characters, even if you can't
understand them. And any time spent learning Japanese will be amply rewarded
by delighted locals, who'll always politely comment on your fine linguistic ability.
However, it takes a very great effort to master Japanese. The primary stumbling block is
the thousands of kanji characters (Chinese ideograms) that need to be memorized,
most of which have at least two pronunciations, depending on the sentence and their
combination with other characters. Also tricky is the language's multiple levels of
politeness , married with different sets of words used by men and women, as well as
different dialects to deal with, involving whole new vocabularies.
Japanese characters
Japanese is written in a combination of three systems. To be able to read a newspaper,
you'll need to know around two thousand kanji , much more di cult than it sounds,
since what each one means varies with its context.
The easier writing systems to pick up are the phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and
katakana . Both have 46 regular characters (see box opposite) and can be learned within
a couple of weeks. Hiragana is used for Japanese words, while katakana , with the
squarer characters, is used mainly for “loan words” borrowed from other languages
(especially English) and technical names. Rōmaji (see opposite), the roman script used
to spell out Japanese words, is also used in advertisements and magazines.
The first five letters in hiragana and katakana ( a , i , u , e , o ) are the vowel sounds (see
“Pronunciation”, opposite). The remainder are a combination of a consonant and a
vowel (eg ka , ki , ku , ke , ko ), with the exception of n , the only consonant that exists on
its own. While hiragana provides an exact phonetic reading of all Japanese words,
katakana does not do the same for foreign loan words. Often words are abbreviated,
hence “television” becomes terebi and “sexual harassment” sekuhara . Sometimes, they
become almost unrecognizable, as with kakuteru (cocktail).
Traditionally, Japanese is written in vertical columns and read right to left. However, the
Western way of writing from left to right, horizontally from top to bottom is increasingly
common. In the media and on signs you'll see a mixture of the two ways of writing.
Grammar
In Japanese verbs do not change according to the person or number, so that ikimasu can
mean “I go”, “he/she/it goes”, or “we/they go”. Pronouns are usually omitted, since it's
generally clear from the context who or what the speaker is referring to. There are no
definite articles , and nouns stay the same whether they refer to singular or plural words.
Compared to English grammar, Japanese sentences are structured back to front. An
English-speaker would say “I am going to Tokyo” which in Japanese would translate
directly as “Tokyo to going”. Placing the sound “ ka ” at the end of a verb indicates a
question , hence Tokyo e ikimasu-ka means “Are you going to Tokyo?” There are also
levels of politeness to contend with, which alter the way the verb is conjugated, and
sometimes change the word entirely. Stick to the polite -masu form of verbs and you
should be fine.