Learn Japanese

Most English speakers believe that Japanese is a very difficult language to learn.  While this is partly true, most of what makes Japanese different from a European language is grammatical differences that when mastered makes the rest of the language easy to learn.  Unfortunately, Japanese is rarely presented in this top-down way.

I found this problem when I bought my first Japanese phrase book.  The book I got was “Japanese For Fun.”  While the book presents a cornucopia of English words and phrases with the Japanese counterparts, all the Japanese words were “romanized” and were even altered to present the pronunciation of it.  While this book is a great resource for introducing yourself to the language, it takes no attempt to explain the fundamentals of the language.  This may work for some but it’s hardly satisfying in the long run, and may produce bad habits that may be difficult to overcome in the future.  I will explain some of the fundamental concepts of Japanese in my next post.

Japan (日本) is an archipelago (a chain/cluster of islands) of about 3000 islands.  The four main islands of Japan from north to south are Hokkaidō, Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū.  There are 47 prefectures in Japan, the equivalent of states in the United States.  The English name Japan is not used in the Japanese language.  The Japanese call Japan either Nihon (にほん) or Nippon (にっぽん), with the latter being more formal.  Both readings have the same definition where the symbol Ni (日) means sun and the symbol Hon/Pon (本) means source.  Nihon is literally translated into “source of the sun” and when this is thought of from a Chinese perspective you get Japan’s unofficial motto “Land of the Rising Sun.”

In my next post I will introduce the Japanese writing system and explain a little about Tokyo.

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