Is Japanese related to Chinese?

25 August 2005

Download this program (Right click and Save As...)

The less it has in common with your native tongue, the more difficult another language seems. By that measure, Japanese is one of the harder languages for English speakers to learn.

But, to start with the good news, the sounds of Japanese pose little problem. Many of them are much like ours, though as you probably know, Japanese has only one sound that corresponds to English "l" and "r". On the downside, Japanese is absolutely unrelated to English, so you don't get a free startup vocabulary of cognates, the way you would in, say, Dutch. Japanese has borrowed plenty of words from other languages, but they're often reshaped, so you might not recognize them. For example, the name "Smith" becomes "Sumisu" and "kuruunekku" is a crew neck sweater. Got that? "kuruunekku" -- crew neck.

Here's a sample of it:
(Japanese language sample)

Japanese grammar isn't really complex, but it's definitely un-English. For example, English sentences usually start with a subject, followed by a verb. In Japanese you have to save verbs until the end of the sentence, and subjects are often left out.

Japanese also has an elaborate system of what is called "honorific" speech: when you talk to superiors or strangers you use different verb forms, sometimes completely different words, from those you use with friends and family.

What can be bewildering for foreigners, is that the Japanese so often seem to cut linguistic corners. They talk about "that" without ever mentioning what "that" refers to, and even leave verbs and entire phrases out of sentences, once everyone knows what the topic of conversation is. To an outsider, a social conversation can be as cryptic as a Mafia telephone call.

Still, these are all things you can master with a reasonable amount of time and effort. It's the Japanese writing system that gives learners fits.

Like many other Asian peoples, the Japanese were enormously influenced by China. And when they began writing their own language -- which is not at all related to Chinese -- they adapted Chinese characters. They took a system already challenging for learners -- thousands of characters to memorize -- and added a new difficulty: they used one character for several different words. If English were written using Chinese characters in the Japanese way, the same character, let's say the one for "horse," might appear as part of the written versions of chivalry, cavalier, horseman, and even knight. The reader has to figure out from context which word is meant. It's not as hard as it could be, though. The Japanese commonly use only about 2,000 characters (as opposed to 5,000 or so for Chinese), and they spell out quite a few things phonetically. But just to keep you on your toes, they do it with two different homegrown systems, and even use the Roman alphabet too! It's not easy -- not even for people born in Japan.

The Japanese sometimes seem to take perverse pride in the obstacles their language poses, but the fact is that foreigners can and do learn it -- some even become Japanese TV personalities. To learn it well, it'll usually take more study than a European language, but the effort is really worthwhile. Japanese has 127 million native speakers, which makes it the eighth most-commonly spoken language in the world, ahead of German, French, and Italian.

The time is long past when the Japanese were feared as an imperialist power or the label "Made in Japan" was thought to mean cheap imitation goods. Today, the world beats a path to Japan to do business, buy its products and enjoy its culture, including pop music and animated cartoons -- everything from sushi to sumo. And the gateway to understanding and appreciating that culture -- a fascinating culture -- is ... the Japanese language.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Blaine Erickson, Assistant Professor of Japanese at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And in the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.