INTRODUCTION TO THE JAPANESE
LANGUAGE
Junry M. Esparar, Ph.D.
FL Instructor
LESSON GOAL:
Discuss the concepts related to the Japanese
language;
Use common words, phrases, and expressions
learned in class; and
Appreciate the importance of learning a foreign
language.
OUTLINE
Activity
Sharing of thoughts
Activity (Semantic Web)
Introduction to the Japanese Language
Reflection
Activity
Guess the
Word
sushi
n
sayonara
tegami
sensei
LET’S TALK ABOUT IT.
How did you find the activity?
LET’S TALK ABOUT IT.
How did you guess the right words?
LET’S TALK ABOUT IT.
What are the Japanese
words you learned today?
Let’s create a concept map.
What comes to your mind when you hear the word, Japanese Language?
Nihongo
NIHONGO: THE JAPANESE
LANGUAGE
Spoken by the approximately 120 million inhabitants of
Japan.
Japanese is still referred to as Nihongo by the
Japanese.
Japanese uses three separate writing systems:
hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: VOCABULARY
Three categories of words exist in Japanese.
The native Japanese words constitute the largest category,
Words originally borrowed from China in earlier history, and the
smallest but a rapidly growing category of words borrowed in
modern times from Western languages such as English.
A small number of words that have come from other Asian
languages.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: SOUNDS OF
THE LANGUAGE
Japanese has an open-syllable sound pattern, so that most syllables end in a
vowel
the syllable may be composed solely of the vowel.
There are five vowels, /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/.
The basic consonants are: /k/, /s/, /t/, /n/, /h/, /m/, /y/, /r/, /w/, and the syllabic
nasal /N/.
Many of these consonants can be palatalized in front of the vowels /a/, /u/, and
/o/, for example, /kya/, /kyu/, /kyo/.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: SOUNDS OF
THE LANGUAGE
Japanese knows relatively few sounds, and pronunciation poses little
problems to most learners.
The biggest difficulty are accents, which do exist, but to a much lower
extent than in the Chinese language.
In addition, there are relatively many homonyms, i.e. words that are
pronounced the same way, but have different meanings.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: LEVELS OF
SPEECH
Different words and expressions are used when talking to an unknown
person or a superior, as opposed to when talking to a child, family
member or a close friend.
For instance, there are more than five different words for the English
word "I", which are used depending on the context.
For formal situations, a honorific language level (keigo) is in common
use.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: GRAMMAR
Every language has a basic word order for the words in a
sentence.
The rule of thumb in Japanese is that in a sentence, the verb
comes at the end.
The two word orders, subject-verb-object for English and
subject-object-verb for Japanese.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: GRAMMAR
Basic Japanese grammar is relatively simple.
Complicating factors such as gender articles and distinctions between
plural and singular are missing almost completely.
Conjugation rules for verbs and adjectives are simple and almost free
of exceptions.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: WRITING
SYSTEM
Japanese is traditionally written vertically, with the lines starting from
the right side of the page.
While this way of writing is still predominant, there is another way that
is identical to English in starting from the top left hand side, with each
line written horizontally.
The Japanese writing system consists of three different character sets:
kanji (thousands of Chinese characters), and hiragana and katakana
(two syllabaries of 46 characters each; together called kana).
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: WRITING
SYSTEM
Chinese characters, or kanji, were brought in from China starting about
1,500 years ago.
Prior to their introduction, Japanese was strictly a spoken language.
Chinese characters are by far the more difficult system because of the
sheer number of characters and the complexity both in writing and
reading each character.
CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE: WRITING
SYSTEM
Texts can be written in two ways: in Western style, i.e. in
horizontal rows from the top to the bottom of the page, or in
traditional Japanese style, i.e. in vertical columns from the
right to the left side of the page. Both writing styles exist
side by side today.
HISTORY OF THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE
There is no conclusive evidence relating Japanese to a single family of languages.
The most prominent hypothesis places Japanese in the Altaic family, which includes
Turkish, Tungusic, Mongolian, and Korean, with the closest relationship to Korean.
According to Roy Andrew Miller, the original Altaic language was spoken in the
Transcaspian steppe country, and the speakers of this language undertook massive
migrations before 2,000 B.C., spreading this language family from Turkey in the
west to Japan in the east.
It is also important to note that in the northern island of Hokkaido, the Ainu people,
who are physically and culturally different from the rest of the Japanese, speak a
language that has even more successfully escaped attempts to relate it to a single
REFERENCES
[Link]
[Link]
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999).
[Link]
[Link]
Japanese language - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia