Quote:
Originally Posted by jchen
I forgot - does Japanese have tones? Chinese has tones. 4 of them, well in Mandarin
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ko n ba n wa mi na sa n.
I studied Japanese for almost a year at a local school about 10 years ago, but I have now forgotten most of it.
Japanese is not a tonal language. (It is a bit like French in that respect.) The voice does not rise and fall in pitch like in other languages.
They have yet another "alphabet" called
romaji, which is a European transliteration of the 46 sounds of two kana systems. It is used as a means of teaching communicating with users of the latin or roman alphabet. The most popular version is called
he bo n, named after its inventor (Hepburn)
The alphabets do not relate to individual letters, but to just 46 permissible syllables. Apart from the vowels (
aieou) and
n, all the other symbols of this so-called
syllabary are a
consonant+vowel combination. Romanji is a phonetic system pronounced like
Italian.
Because the language has so few sounds, it is rich in ambiguity and puns.
The Kanji characters are the same as Chinese, of which a well educated Japanese would know and use about 2000. They are not phonetic. Each character will normally have 2 entirely different meanings, which adds to the ambiguity. The most useful kana for us is
Katakana (the spikey alphabet), which is usually is close to an English word.
Like in Spanish V and B sound the same. L sounds like an R, which leads to words such as
"te re bi" for televi(sion)
The writing systems are the hardest part of this language, as grammar is relatively simple. Fascinating!
