I think many people get confused with Japanese, Korean and Chinese cultures.
We have a lot of common habits, but also we have a lot of different habits too.
Today, I want to tell you how similar and different our languages are by explaining Japanese language.
https://www.barcelonaseikatsu.com/kyoshitsu/nihongokyoshitsu/
First of all, we use three alphabets called Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. We usually use Hiragana and Kanji to write a sentence.Hiragana and Katakana is Japanese original syllabic alphabets, but Kanji is based on Chinese alphabets. Usually, Hiragana is used for Japanese words and Katakana is used for foreign words.
This is how they look like.
<Kanji>
川 森 美 難 楽
If you are familiar with Asian languages, you can see that it’s same as Chinese.
Korean also use some Chinese alphabets too.
However, Japanese have some Kanji that Chinese don’t have.
For example, “小川 美咲” This is my name in Japanese.
Chinese have these “小川 美”, but don’t have “咲”.
<Hiragana>
あ い う え お
My name in Hiragana is “おがわ みさき”
<Katakana>
ア イ ウ エ オ
My name in Katakana is “オガワ ミサキ”
In these ways, I can write my name in three ways.
The biggest difference between English and Japanese is grammar.
For instance,
<English>
“I went to school today.”
<Japanese>
“私は今日学校へ行った。”
The direct translation without correcting grammatical order in English is
“I today school to went.”
As you can see, the object comes next to the subject and the verb comes to the end.
These are the just part of the difference between Japanese and English.
It’s said that Japanese is the most difficult language for English speaker to learn. According to the foreign service institution, Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Japanese are in the category that takes the longest time to learn for native English speaker. Furthermore, it says that Japanese is the most difficult in the category.
It sounds really difficult to learn Japanese, BUT please don’t give up!! I have many friends who learned Japanese by themselves. They learned for two years in Japan. Now, they can speak fluent Japanese!
If you are interested in foreign language, just go for it!!
Misaki.O
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