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 Japanese is the official language of Japan which has one of the worlds highest literacy rates at 99%. Written Japanese is made up of a combination of Chinese characters (kanji) and two forty-six letter Japanese phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana). Traditionally, Japanese is written and read from right-to-left, top-to-bottom. However in recent years, it has become popular to write from left-to-right, top-to-bottom as is done in Western languages.Spoken Japanese is unique unto itself. It does not belong to a family of languages in the same way that Spanish, Italian, French, etc. belong to the Romance language family. It is believed that Japanese is a combination of the Altaic languages of northern Asia and the Malaysian-Indonesian-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia.Japanese sentences are structured "subject, object, verb", however it is not necessary to have a subject in order to make a complete sentence. In fact, a single verb can be a complete sentence. Verbs are not conjugated based on subject. The word "ikimasu", for example can mean I, they or we go, or he, she or it goes or will go. "Ikimasu" by itself is a complete sentence. The reader or listener determines the subject of the sentence based on context.
Japanese has tenses such as present, past, future, past perfect, etc. In addition, Japanese verbs are conjugated based on polite speech, regular speech and casual speech. The casual or basic conjugation of "ikimasu", for example, is "iku" and the polite form would be "ikemasu" or "ikaremasu". There is also a different style of speech for men and for women. (see Etiquette)
Japanese is based on the five basic vowel sounds [ä palm, ē eagle, ōō move, ĕ net, and ō go]. Words always end in a vowel except sometimes "n" which is pronounced more like a combination of an "n" and "m".
The Japanese have a long history of borrowing from other languages. In fact, Japanese writing is based on Chinese characters, or "kanji". Japanese words which have been taken from foreign languages are known as "gairai-go" which literally means "language coming from abroad." An early example of this is the Japanese word for bread which is "pan". Since bread was unknown to the Japanese until the Portuguese first introduced it in the late 16th century, the Japanese adopted the Portuguese word. Because many western customs, concepts and technologies have been introduced to Japan since the Second World War, contemporary Japanese vocabulary is full of "gairai-go." In fact, it is estimated that over 20% of contemporary Japanese vocabulary comes from foreign languages. Some examples of this include: tennis (pronounced "te-ni-su"), computer ("com-pew-tah"), camera ("ka-me-ra"), cake ("kay-i-ki") and game ("gay---mu"). Notice that the Japanese add a vowel sound to the end of words which end in a hard consonant sound. This is because Japanese words always end in a vowel (except for the "m/n" sound) and they find the pronunciation very difficult. In comparing the sound of spoken Japanese with a western language, it is often said that Japanese resembles a "flattened out" version of Italian with which it shares many sounds. It is "flattened out" because while Italian has many inflections, Japanese is relatively even toned.
Written Japanese is a combination of Chinese characters (kanji) and two forty-six letter Japanese phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana). The Japanese also use our 26 letter alphabet to write western words in special circumstances. This type of writing is called, roma-ji which means Roman character or letter.
Traditionally, Japanese is written and read from right-to-left, top-to-bottom. However in recent years, it has become popular to write from left-to-right, top-to-bottom as is done in Western languages. For the most part, word processors and computer programs are set up this way which also allows for the inclusion of Western words in the form of roma-ji within Japanese text.
 
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