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General
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| Language
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The written language
of Japan is a combination of Chinese derived ideograms (Kanji) and phonetic
syllabary. Although it uses Chinese ideographs in its writing, Japanese
does not bear any linguistic relation to Chinese, apart from using Chinese
pronunciations and ideographs. The Japanese people can neither speak nor
understand Chinese unless they have studied it. In other words, Chinese
and Japanese are completely different languages.
Generally, it is
agreed that the sentence structure and grammar of Japanese is part of
the Ural-Altaic languages. It is a group that extends across northcentral
Asia, reaching into eastern Europe (Korean, Mongol, Turkish, Hungarian,
Finnish, and Estonian).
There are three different
writing systems: Kanji (Chinese characters), Hiragana, and Katakana. Hiragana
is usually used for grammatical endings of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and
particles, as well as other original Japanese words, which are not written
in Kanji. On the other hand, Katakana is used for writing loan words and
the names of people and geographical places that cannot be written in
Kanji. Texts can be written in two ways: horizontally from the top to
the bottom, or vertically starting in the upper right corner and proceeding
to the left. The latter is the traditional and still commonly used way,
which books are written.
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