Japanese 🇯🇵
Learning a new language
Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, [ɲihoŋɡo] (listen)) is spoken natively by
about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in
Japan, the only country where it is the national language.
Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with relatively simple
phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length,
and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally
subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of
words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Sentence-final particles
are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or form questions. Nouns
have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs
are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese
adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of
honorifics, with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative
status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.
The Japanese writing system combines Chinese characters, known as kanji
(漢字, 'Han characters'), with two unique syllabaries (or moraic
scripts) derived by the Japanese from the more complex Chinese
characters: hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名, 'simple characters') and
katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名, 'partial characters'). Latin script
(rōmaji ローマ字) is also used in a limited fashion (such as for
imported acronyms) in Japanese writing. The numeral system uses mostly
Arabic numerals, but also traditional Chinese numerals.