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Posted on October 23, 2009 by Language Tutor | Posted under Language
Learn Japanese, Be a Ninja
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Teaching yourself Japanese can also be serious business however. The Japanese are alsoknown to be dead-serious about things, especially when it comes to business (if you caughtthat pun, you’re as morbid as I am!) However, seriously though, if you want to know how tolearn Japanese, it would be a good idea to look a little deeper into Japanese culture and so-ciety. After all, who wouldn’t want to have the ability to communicate with the same peoplewho gave the world Zen Buddhism (which is such a hot topic right now!) and haiku? And didI mention ninjas? Okay, so you’ve convinced yourself that you want to know how to speak Japanese. Admit-tedly, the Japanese language has its difficulties, as with all languages. I think teaching your-self how to write Japanese can be difficult, as they use an extensive set of characters. Andthey can look difficult to write. I mean for me honestly just looking at Japanese characters,even without trying to understand them, I feel like I’m looking at paintings. Indeed calligraphyis a traditional art form that is revered and popular in Japan. And some Japanese characters,like Chinese characters, are ideograms, meaning they’re sort of simplified pictures meant torepresent whole words. I’m talking about the Kenji script which is a body of around 1,000characters based on Chinese but don’t worry—as a beginner you are expected to master theHiragana and Katakana scripts first. For the most part Japanese writing, as with Japanese speech is based on syllables. Thesesyllables are combinations of 5 vowels and 15 consonants which translate to the less than200 characters used in Hiragana and Katakana (do not confuse this with the katana, the tra-ditional Japanese sword!) But think of it this way: master these and you will have masteredthe pronunciation of virtually all Japanese words. There are no awkward combinations of let-ters to consider, which English obviously has a lot of. The Japanese language also emphasizes politeness and respect. Apart from casual speech,the teineigo (polite language), sonkeigo (respectful language) and kenjōgo (humble language) are variations on Japanese language used by the speaker or writer depending on dif-ferent contexts of authority. Don’t fret though—as a beginner, master the teineigo as that willbe quite sufficient for most conversations. Once you have mastered the syllables and the polite language, you can move on to gram-mar, which you will find is quite simple. Verbs have no gender and no singular/plural form.Sentence structure is loose so long as proper grammatical “particles” are affixed to nouns to denote their function in a sentence. Verbs usually come last. Teaching yourself how to speak Japanese will be the easier part of your journey towards becoming a true ninja (well knowing the names of your moves and weapons is the first step, isn’t it?) As you’ve surmised, here’s how to learn Japanese efficiently: master the more difficult partsof the language, especially the writing. Once you move on to grammar, you may begin merci-lessly spewing bad-ass, grammatically correct one-liners at your enemies! About The Author: I'm a traveler and language discoverer. My profession as tourist guide has encouraged me to learn different languages especially Japanese. One of the most interesting language to discover of all the other languages I've learned. I hope to share with you some of my articles to help you learn Japanese quick and easy. |
Tags: JAPANESE, JAPANESE-LANGUAGE, TEACH YOURSELF JAPANESE, LEARN JAPANESE, SPEAK JAPANESE, JAPANESE QUICK AND EASY
