By Sarah-Claire Jordan
Japanese may be the easiest East Asian language to learn, and Japanese culture has certainly made its way to the U.S. and other countries in the form of anime, cuisine, fashion, and more. Still, like many countries of East Asia, Japan is still a bit of a mystery to many of us. Despite the number of Japanese character tattoos and sushi restaurants, we need to get deeper into what it means to be Japanese before we start to claim these things.
A huge part of being Japanese is speaking Japanese, of course, so understanding a bit more about the language would be the first step to understanding Japanese culture. Just like the unique culture of Japan, the Japanese language has many interesting characteristics. Here are just a handful of things that make Japanese the distinctive language of which we may (or may not) know a few words.
1. There are some holes in the history of Japanese
The most notable hole is where the prehistory of Japanese should be, which would include when the language was first used in Japan. We do have records from the 3rd century written in Chinese that include a few Japanese words, but from then until the 8th century there are no written records of the Japanese language.
2. Chinese and Japanese are not as similar as you think
They are geographically very close, but there are no proven genetic similarities between Chinese and Japanese. This is a bit confusing, as one of the writing systems used for writing in Japanese, kanji, uses Chinese characters. On top of that, a big chunk of Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. However, it is impossible for the two languages to be related, as no one has been able to prove that Japanese is related to any other language.
3. Japanese has three official writing systems
Kanji is used to write Chinese loanwords as well as many words with Japanese origins. Hirigana characters are used to write words that don’t have kanji representation, that aren’t written using kanji anymore, and also to show verb endings after kanji words. Hirigana is a syllabary, as is katakana, which is used to write words from other languages as well as the names for animals and plants. Today, Japanese is written using all of these systems, depending on the origin of the word
4. Japanese is spoken differently depending on who you are talking to
There is an elaborate grammatical system to show politeness in Japanese as well as formality. In terms of addressing people, there are four different suffixes that can be used: kun, chan, san, and sama. Kun is a little bit condescending, while chan is used for close friends and family. San is like Mr. or Mrs. and is used to show universal respect. Finally, sama is a suffix that isn’t used very much, but is a more extreme version of san that is used when talking to someone with more authority.
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