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- The History of Japanese Language
- Japanese Writing
- Japanese Pronunciation
- Buying Japanese Translations
The History of Japanese Language
The Japanese began to import and adapt the Chinese characters from the 4th Century. The first writings took the form of Classical Chinese or a Japanese-Chinese hybrid, but the writing system evolved to manipulate Chinese characters in Japanese style. Known as man'yōgana, literally ‘Ten Thousand leaf syllabic script’, the system used the phonetic values of the written characters. Japanese characters continued to be used for words borrowed from Chinese, or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were also used for their phonetic values to write grammatical elements: they were simplified and eventually became two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana.
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Japanese Writing
Modern Japanese is written with a mixture of hiragana, katakana and kanji. Texts may also include rōmaji, (Roman letters), the standard way of writing Japanese with the Latin alphabet, eimoji (English script), and non-Japanese words written in their own script and various symbols known as kigō.
Japanese grammar is on the whole relatively simple. Compared to other languages, there are very few complicated features – nouns, for example, stay the same however they are used.
The layout of Japanese writing varies depending on the document. For horizontal writing it reads from left to right, whilst for vertical writing, it reads from right to left.
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Japanese Pronunciation
Japanese has a restricted number of sounds which means pronunciation does not pose many problems for most learners. There are however many homonyms – words that are pronounced in the same way but have different meanings. Local accents could pose a problem to learners not familiar with tone-based languages.
The words and expressions used in Japanese vary depending on the relationship between speakers, such as when addressing an unknown person or a superior, a child, relative or a close friend. For example, there are several different words for the first person singular pronoun ‘I’. For formal situations, an honorific language level (keigo) is still common.
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Buying Japanese Translations
The most complicated aspect of Japanese translation is clarifying the audience, purpose and meaning of the text you need to translate. You should try to provide as much information as possible to make sure that your Japanese translation can keep the meaning and purpose of the original document.
In Japanese, answers to passive interrogative forms (“don't you...” or ”isn't it...”) will take a negative form even though they have a positive meaning. This is because answers to Japanese sentences have a tendency to either admit or deny.
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