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THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE

The intricacies of the Japanese language

Japanese is a unique language in that it uses three different character sets. These three character sets are “kanji”, “hiragana”, and “katakana”. Altogether alien from western Romantic languages, Japanese is also largely different from its Chinese cousin. Below, I will explain a little about each of the Japanese characters sets.

Kanji is a character type that is derived from Chinese characters. While many kanji may be exactly the same or nearly the same as their Chinese counterparts, some of the Japanese kanji have evolved and are presently nothing like their Chinese predecessors. Interestingly, when a Japanese person travels to China or Taiwan if they cannot speak the language they can usually get by with a pad that they write the kanji on in attempts to communicate. Granted, this will not work for every occasion but is more a sort of survival communication.

Hiragana characters are simpler than Kanji characters. Hiragana characters are made up of vowel sounds only, a single consonant and vowel, or a sound similar to a phonetic “n” sound. In modern Japanese, hiragana is used as particles and for some words for which there is no kanji. Also, hiragana is used as a tool to teach young children how to pronounce kanji.

Katakana characters are pronounced exactly like hiragana but are written differently. Japanese love to import foreign words from other languages and especially English. Today’s katakana is almost entirely used to write out a foreign word and to help Japanese more easily pronounce it. If you know how to read katakana and come across a word written in katakana, chances are you will be able to sound it out into an English word that you know.

Lastly, and not included in the three Japanese character sets but can presently be seen throughout Japan is the Roman alphabet. While in western countries you may see a growing number of people with tattoos of Japanese characters, in contrast you can see many shirts or items written in English in Japan.

WARNING: if you plan on getting a tattoo using Chinese or Japanese characters it is highly recommended that you are 100% sure you know the meaning of the characters you are about to permanently have printed on your body. More than a few times, I have personally seen mistakes in the characters themselves and once I have seen a set of characters that meant something very degrading to the person on which the tattoo was printed, while the poor girl thought it meant something else entirely.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, and even more commonplace are the mistakes I see here in Japan with the butchering of the English language. There are whole websites out there that exist solely to make fun of these mistakes. While these mistakes may be amusing to see, it is also sad to know that your sign, shirt, item, etc. has earned you more infamy than fame.