10 fun facts about Japanese

I will be starting learning Japanese next month at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in London but I have already casually studied ‘Japanese for busy people’ (yes I am a very busy man) and so far I tell you folks: Japanese is fun and (relatively) easy. Everybody gives it a try! (warning: some or all of the following may be entirely wrong and I will only realise my pain it when I start the lessons).

1. No genders in Japanese, everything’s neutral just like in English, no headache like in French or in German.

2. Pronunciation is super easy. It is actually one of the poorest phonetic systems: only five vowels, few consonants and no sound that doesn’t exist in English or French. Conversely, Japanese struggle with European languages. They cannot pronounce two consonants in a row or an isolated consonant at the end of a word: they can only hear and pronounce syllables composed of one consonant and one vowel. So they insert a vowel (generally a ‘u’) to have only full syllables. For instance France will become Fu-ran-su.

3. Grammar is easy, no conjugation, few tense forms, the present and future form is exactly the same (you only know it’s one or the other from the context or if there is a time adverb).

4. Writing, well, I am not sure. Here’s what I got so far. Old Japanese used to be written entirely in Chinese Kanji (ideograms). Then (and it’s a good story) some women introduced Hiragana and then Katakana ; both are phonetic alphabet of about 40 simple characters: ma, mu, mi, mo, me, ka, ku, ki, ko, etc… I understand they did it because they were not allowed to have formal education and learn kanjis so they educated themselves through an easier system. Katakana was also the way to integrate foreign words and concepts into Japanese. So you would think it’s relatively easy to learn how to read and write, but the problem is in fact, nowaday’s newspapers and books and billboards are written in a combination of kanjis, katakana and hiragana so knowing one of the alphabets or even the two will not be enough to understand a text if you don’t know the kanjis at all. So far I have studied phonetically with the romanized transcriptions (‘romaji’) that Japanese can read but would never use.

5. We think we have too many English words in French but it seems there are many more in Japanese. Supu (soup), jusu (juice), terebi (television), basu (bus), takushi (taxi), depato (department store), beddo (bed). But I suspect there is another, older Japanese word for each. On the other hand they have a Japanese name for baseball (yakyu) - this is because English was banned during WWII and they were already playing baseball.

6. Now difficult bits. First the verb comes at the end, like in German. But that should be OK.

7. Another difficult thing is the way of counting. They have abstract numbers (ichi, ni, san) but to mention three people, three books or three apples they will use three or four slightly different systems.

8. But the really difficult thing is politeness. Using the right degree of politeness. There are three ways of saying yes: 'Hai' is very polite, 'Ee' still polite, 'Un' very familiar. Generally speaking, you use the most polite form more often than you would in any other language, and you are better off being too polite than risking not being enough.

9. Surprising form of politeness for a European: there are several ways of saying ‘I’. My textbook always use 'watashi' but Maki tells me it is very very businessy and as a man I could use ‘boku’ instead in a casual conversation, while there are other ways of addressing. Between mates, a cooler way is 'ore'.

10. Japanese hates pronouns and hardly use them at all. The familiar ‘you’ (tu, thou) is seldom used and there is simply no polite you (vous, usted) as far as I am aware. The polite way of addressing someone is to speak at the third person using his/her very name. For instance, Mr A speaking of me to Mr B will say ‘Vincent-san wa furansu-jin desu’ (Mr Vincent is French), but if Mr A is speaking to me, it will ALSO be ‘Vincent-san wa furansu-jin desu’ (You are French), but then I am wondering, who is he talking to, is there another Vincent in the room?