Sayap Timur

Understand Japanese language (part I)

I try to learn Japanese language now.. i only learn from the internet, so i might not have a good pronunciation, because i couldn’t hear anything or no one will tell me how to pronounce the word. but i think Japanese language is not to difficult to understand.. the only thing that hard is the way they use the writing.. but, if we only want to talk and maybe having some conversation in Japanese language, then it will not to difficult to learn…
here the first lesson.. and it is why it’s not difficult to learn it.

The Japanese language has only 5 vowels: A, I, U, E, O. They are terse vowels, pronounced clearly and sharply. If we pronounces the vowels in the following sentence we will have their approximate sounds. Please note: the “U” is pronounced with no forward movement of the lips.

Ah (a), we (i) soon (u) get (e) old (o).

Here are some characteristics of Japanese grammar.

1. Japanese nouns have no gender and number.
   hon = a book or books
   kuruma = a car or cars
2. Verb conjugation is not affected by the gender or number.
   • Watashi wa bideo o yoku mimasu. (私はビデオをよく見ます。)
     = I watch videos often.
   • Kare wa terebi o yoku mimasu. (彼はテレビをよく見ます。)
     = He watches TV often.
3. Japanese verbs have only two tenses: the present and the past. The present tense refers to habitual action or the future. The past tense is used for actions completed in the past. It is also equivalent to the English present perfect or past perfect.

The Japanese writing system is totally different from English, because it does not use an alphabet. It may be the most difficult part of Japanese to learn, but I think it is also fun and interesting. There are three different types of writing scripts in Japanese.

1. Kanji
2. Hiragana
3. Katakana

People writes Japanese using a combination of all three.

Besides the three forms of writing (kanji, hiragana, katakana), Japanese is sometimes written in Romaji. Romaji is primarily used for the convenience of foreigners. With Romaji, we can read Japanese without knowing any Japanese writing system. Although there are several systems of Romaji, the most widely used is a modified Hepburn system.
All three types of Japanese characters are designed to be written in vertical lines, from right to left, but they can be written horizontally as well. Years ago, almost all Japanese writing was vertical, but the horizontal style has slowly become more popular since it is easier to include Arabic numerals and passages from other foreign languages. However most newspapers still retain the vertical style.

English is a subject-verb-object language. But Japanese is a subject-object-verb language. (so are Korean, Turkish, etc.) Generally the subject comes first, then the object and the verb comes at the end of the sentence.

Tanaka-san wa ringo o tabemasu.
Mr. Tanaka apple eat.

Tom-san wa terebi o mimashita.
Tom TV watched.

The word(s) written in Bold are the subject
The word(s) written in Italic are the Object
and the word(s) written with Underline are the Verb.

“San” is a title of respect added to a name. (so it can not be used when referring to ourself.)
“Wa” and “o” are particles. They are like English prepositions, but they always come after nouns. Particles are very important for proper Japanese sentence structure.

Composing questions in Japanese is easy! The word order remains the same, and a sentence becomes a question by adding the particle “ka” at the end. Question marks are not used in Japanese.

Tanaka-san wa  ringo o tabemasu ka. (田中さんはりんごを食べますか。)
= Does Mr. Tanaka eat apples?

Tom-san wa terebi o mimashita ka. (>トムさんはテレビを見ましたか。)
= Did Tom watch TV?

ok… isn’t it very easy to understand Japanese language? we can learn it so easy, but of course we have to learn more and more Japanese vocabulary and try the pronunciation.. the other things is not as difficult as other languages..
but i guess that’s all for this first part, because i still need to learn, too… and of course.. if there are anything wrong with my post, please tell me, so i can learn more and more…
and maybe you can not read some of the text that wrote in japanese text using Shift-JIS or UTF-8 encode, so please change your browser encode using Shift-JIS or UTF-8.

Tulisan ini telah dilayangkan pada hari Rabu, 9 Mei 2007 pukul 1347 dan ada dalam kategori Learning. Anda dapat menulis tanggapan, atau trackback dari situs anda.