Japanese

Interested in learning Japanese, visiting, studying in, or living in Japan?

Japanese is comprised of three character sets - two of these, the hiragana and katakana, are sylabic alphabets, each comprising of 46 characters. Have a look here to see katakana, and hiragana. Hiragana are used for particles, to aid in the reading of kanji, and for endings of words after kanji. Katakana are used for borrowed words, and foreign names. The third character set is kanji, which are Chinese characters, of which there are approximately 2,000 used.

Kanji typically have two or more readings, either onyomi (Chinese reading), or kunyomi (Japanese reading). The Chinese readings sometimes are similar to actual pronuniciation of the characters in Chinese, whereas the Japanese readings are not.

Japanese grammar is relatively straightforward. Basic sentence structure in Japanese a simple sentence such as I eat fish - becomes Watashi ha sakana o tabemasu. (lit. I fish eat - with a couple particles thrown in), or in other words, Subject, object verb.

For the most part, the language isn't as full of irregularities and grammatical inconsistencies such as English is (trust me!!!).

UCC offers a number of sections of first and second year Japanese in the Department of English and Modern Languages.

There are numerous online Japanese websites.