How Japanese Works: A Linguistic Perspective
A big thank you to the person who requested today’s topic!
Let’s look at the basics of Japanese that you should know before you begin studying - from a linguistic perspective. We’ll cover the basics of sounds in Japanese, the writing system, grammar, and formality levels. I don’t teach beginner level Japanese, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what potential learners should know before they begin so they can feel prepared!
If you like to think of languages in terms of their patterns, or if you like to think of them almost like a puzzle that you want to solve, this video is perfect for you!
The Sounds in Japanese
Alright! Let’s jump right in - beginning with the sound system in Japanese.
There are a total of 5 vowels and about 15 consonant sounds. The “letters”, or “kana (仮名)” are almost always made up of either one vowel sound, or a vowel and a consonant sound. In total, there are 100 distinct syllables, which are actually called “mora”, but that's a topic for another time.
Let’s look at a few examples of kana:
あ (a)
け (ke)
つ (tsu)
This first one is one vowel sound only and the second is one consonant and one vowel sound together. The third one is one or two consonant sounds, depending on how you thank about the “ts” sound, plus a vowel.
Japanese doesn’t have stressed and unstressed syllables like we do in English. Instead, it has what’s called pitch accent, which is similar to, but different from, tone. There are 4 different pitch accent patterns in Common (or Standard) Japanese. Let’s only look at 2 patterns so we don’t get caught up in it right now.
When spelled out using the roman alphabet they look the same, but by having two different pitch patterns for these words, we can hear the difference between the word for rain and candy.
To learn more about pitch accent, click here!
The Writing System
Now that we know the essentials of how the sound system works, let’s move on to the writing system.
There are 3 different ways of writing in Japanese: They are called hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Kanji are also sometimes called “Chinese characters”.
Most native speaker adults today recognize over 2,000 kanji and university-educated people know about 3,000 kanji. However, in total, there are over 50,000 of them. Don’t worry, nobody knows them all.
Hiragana tend to look softer and have rounder edges. We learn hiragana before any other writing system. They are used to write the readings for kanji, although sometimes they can also replace kanji. Hiragana are also used to write grammatical parts in a sentence.
We learn katakana next, which looks more angular. We use katakana to write loan words, scientific words including animal names sometimes, company names, and slang words. Many scientific words and company names have kanji as well, but writing them in katakana can sometimes feel more official. It can also make these words easier to read.
Kanji, the third writing system, often look complicated to write, but they’re much less complicated once you realise they’re made up of different parts that get put together in different ways. You cannot write a sentence in Japanese using only kanji. They’re used to write nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs.
Word Order
We’ve covered the sounds and writing system so far and next, let’s talk about word order and grammar.
To do this, let’s compare a simple English sentence with how it would be in Japanese.
We have the sentence: I eat sushi.
“I” is the subject of the sentence, the one doing the verb. “Eat| is the verb, and “sushi” is the object of the sentence, the thing being verbed.
The word order in English is subject verb object, or SVO.
In Japanese, this same sentence would sound like: 私が寿司を食べます。(Watashi ga sushi o tabemasu.)
私 (watashi) is the subject and it comes first, just like in English. But next we have 寿司 (sushi), which is our object, and lastly, we have 食べます (tabemasu), the verb. So, Japanese is SOV order.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t mention the が (ga) and を (wo/o) from this sentence, it’s because they’re the particles. They tell us what the purpose of the word coming immediately before it is.
が (ga) is what’s called the subject marker, and を (wo/o) is the object marker.
私 (watashi) comes immediately before が (ga) so we know that the subject is 私 (watashi) and 寿司 (sushi) comes immediately before を (wo/o) so we know that the object is 寿司 (sushi).
To be honest, the more natural way of saying this sentence would be 私は寿司を食べます (watashi wa sushi o tabemasu)。 But the は (wa) vs が (ga) particle differences and similarities are a little complex sometimes, so we won’t get into it today.
Because of these particles we have in Japanese, word order is much more flexible than it is in English. There are lots of particles, and they may be a bit confusing at first because we don’t have them in English, once you get used to them, they’re so helpful and so convenient.
Formality in Japanese
Now that we’ve looked at the basics of grammar, let’s talk about formality. English doesn’t really have formal and informal levels of speech, but broadly speaking, Japanese has 3.
We use casual Japanese is used with friends and close family members. Polite Japanese is taught in classrooms, and we tend to use it with people we don’t know very well, with our teachers, and with strangers. Honorific Japanese is frequently used in business settings, in customer service.
Learn more about the different levels of formality here!
A Quick Summary
Let’s review and summarise what we just talked about.
Sounds
There are 5 vowel sounds and about 15 consonant sounds
They’re almost always arranged in vowel only, or consonant and vowel pairs
Japanese has what’s called pitch accent to help differentiate meaning between words that would otherwise sound the same
Writing
There are 3 writing systems. They are called hiragana, katakana, and kanji
Hiragana looks rounder, and is used to write readings for kanji and grammatical parts of a sentence
Katakana is more angular, and it’s used to write loan words, slang, and often scientific words too
Kanji may look complex, but they’re made of different components. They’re used to write nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs in a sentence. Most native speaker adults today can recognize about 2,000 kanji.
Japanese frequently uses all 3 writing systems in one sentence.
Grammar
Sentences are constructed in SOV order, so verbs come at the end, unlike English.
Japanese uses particles, which indicate the grammatical role that words take in a sentence. This allows for a certain amount of flexibility in word order.
Formality
There are basically 3 levels of formality and we decide which one to use depending on the social setting - like hanging out with close friends vs providing customer service at a hotel front desk - and your relationship with the person you’re speaking with. The 3 levels are casual, polite, and honorific. We constantly switch between different levels of formality in Japan, but in a classroom, you’ll probably only use polite Japanese.
Conclusion
We went through a lot about how Japanese works! Leave your questions and comments below and I may make a follow-up video to respond.
If you already know these basics of the Japanese language and you’re looking to level up and differentiate yourself from other learners, consider checking out these resources:
Thanks for sticking around until the end! If you enjoyed it, please leave a comment or question for me! I love hearing from you.
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