Chinese businesses that can speak simple even for beginners (Japanese Edition)

Hiragana is primarily used for native Japanese words while foreign words are represented by katakana , so it may be helpful to focus on hiragana first. Kanji, the written script for Japanese, is a bit more complex. Adults are considered fluent in kanji when they know 2, characters, but practicing even a little of this adapted writing system can help you learn Japanese vocabulary faster. The characters in kanji, made up of smaller parts called radicals, are pronounced using sounds from the Japanese phonetic alphabets. Because most characters in Japanese have only one pronunciation, it eliminates a great deal of ambiguity for beginners.

Sounds in Japanese are similar to those in English, with five vowel sounds and just a handful of consonants. Syllables in Japanese are also easier to pronounce because they have equal stress but there are some differences in intonation. Japanese has two pitches- low and high. Note that the pitch in Japanese can change the meaning of a word so listen carefully to make sure you get it right. Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio.

Here is a link to the audio instead. As previously mentioned, Kanji is the Japanese written system of characters, adapted from Chinese. While some language learners find writing one of the most challenging parts of Japanese, there are a few tips that can make learning kanji a little easier. Being able to read road signs, menus, and maps will ease your journey and make communicating with locals a bit easier.

While there are no shortcuts to mastering kanji , there are a few tips that may help language learners pick up the basics of writing and reading Japanese. Image associations This helpful memory trick works for any language that utilizes more complex characters and involves associating the image with an object. Look at each Japanese character and try to find something familiar that it resembles. For instance, this is the kanji character for the word stop in Japanese: As you can see, it looks very much like a stop sign and works well for an image association method because it resembles the word it represents.

Reading manga can be especially helpful for language learners as comic books are rich with image and contextual cues to help decipher the meaning of the written words. Another good place to begin is the Japanese manga series called One Piece by Eiichiro Oda holds the Guinness World Record for the most copies published of the same comic book series by a single author.

Learn Kanji radicals Radicals are specific parts of a written character and once you learn a few of them, you may be able to guess at the meaning of a more complex word. Although kanji is not always as simple as breaking each character into smaller parts, once you get a feel for Japanese you can see connections between components of written words. Chat online with other learners Practice makes perfect and what better way to set aside time to work on kanji than to commit to writing in Japanese. Rosetta Stone has a web app that allows you to chat with other learners, helping you hone in on the characters that are used more often in daily conversations.

Some keyboards can be switched to Japanese characters using a few simple commands or you can use a Japanese keyboard online. Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, etc. And in the fairly infrequent cases when pitch is used to distinguish meaning, the context will almost always do the heavy lifting for you. A lot of digital ink has spilled in the blogosphere bemoaning how difficult it is to learn Kanji. Armed with the right attitude, methods, and materials, a motivated adult learner can master the meaning and writing of all standard use Kanji in a matter of months, not years or even decades as is usually the case with traditional rote approaches.

They have only to learn how to read them. In fact, Chinese grammar and pronunciation have about as much to do with Japanese as English does. It is their knowledge of the meaning and writing of the kanji that gives the Chinese the decisive edge. For more about how to learn Kanji effectively, see my post: How to Learn 2, Kanji in 3 Months: Contrary to popular belief, most Kanji are not pictographs.

This may sound complex, but is actually very good news for language learners!

The Japanese Language is Not Vague, But Japanese Etiquette Often Requires Vagueness

These chunks also give you valuable story points that can be used to craft super sticky mnemonics. A massive cloud of multicolored insects butterflies to be exact are crafting a magnificent double rainbow across the entire sky. Once you know the meaning of all the standard use Kanji, you can usually guess the meaning of compound words they combine to create. Know the character, guess the word. An equivalent power in English would require extensive knowledge of Latin, Greek, and a host of ancient Germanic dialects.

Even the most basic knowledge of characters enables you to figure out its meaning: It must mean foreigner! We can thank the Japanese themselves for helping to perpetuate the myth that Japanese is a vague language. Jay Rubin recounts in his excellent book Making Sense of Japanese , a member the Tokyo String Quartet once shared in an NPR interview that English allowed him and other Japanese members of the ensemble to communicate more effectively than in Japanese.

They had begun speaking in English once a non-Japanese member joined the group and were amazed how much easier it seemed to communicate in English despite not being native speakers. Rubin points out that the problem is a matter of culture, not linguistics:. The Japanese language can express anything it needs to, but Japanese social norms often require people to express themselves indirectly or incompletely.

Anyone who has lived in Japan or done business with a Japanese company knows that this difference in communication style can be a major source of frustration and cross-cultural miscommunication. With the exception of purposefully designed languages like Esperanto, languages evolve organically over great expanses of time, inevitably leading to some strange exceptions and goofy contradictions.

Hamburgers are not made from ham, English muffins were not invented in England, and French Fries were not invented in France. Sweetmeats are confectionery, while sweetbreads, which are not sweet, are meat. If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth? And then there are incredibly weird English pronunciations, as Benny has read a poem about! One could of course compile such a list for any language, including Japanese.

My point is simply that Japanese is no less logical than English. Both have their quirks, but both also have a finite set of rules and exceptions easy enough for even a child to master. Threadgold is an Essex dairy farmer whose ewe's milk cheese wins prizes and, with his jovial face and long sideburns, he looks the part. So when he stands up and announces the first question, it is surprising - almost shocking - to hear his words. A variety of Slovenian? Some words sound half-familiar, yet this is not French or German, and it certainly isn't Essex.

One thing is clear. Whatever language Threadgold is using, his audience understands him.

Why Japanese is Easier than You Think

For no sooner has he begun the quiz than they are teasing him for clues or pressing him for clarification, and all in the same exuberant tongue, with its "o" and "oi" sounds, and its hints of known languages. An outsider chancing upon this gathering would almost certainly assume that here was a band of expatriates, come together to share fond memories of a distant homeland. Only later might the truth dawn - that it is the shared language, not some common origin, that binds them.

For, apart from Dominique, a French database administrator who happened to pitch up in East Anglia, everybody here is as British as the day is wet. They just happen to speak Esperanto. Not that anyone "just happens" to speak Esperanto. For this language has no territory to call its own. Intended for use as a universal second language - an auxiliary tongue by means of which all people, no matter what their origins, might communicate freely - it is a constructed thing, a deliberate invention that must be deliberately learned.

The fact that, years after the birth of Esperanto, few people reading this article will know a single word of it - may not even be aware of its existence - is an indication of just how reluctant the world has been to take that obvious next step. In , William Shatner starred in Incubus, the first film to be made in the language.

Conrad Hall, the cinematographer on that project, went on to shoot American Beauty. But what became of Esperanto? Neither the UN nor the EU has adopted it as a working language, and not a single multinational corporation or charity employs it in its day-to-day dealings. Yet nobody in this church hall seems unduly downhearted. Which isn't to say they don't occasionally feel ever so slightly indignant.

Listen to Roy Simmons. A year-old assistant headteacher at a comprehensive school in east London, he has come to Ipswich because, in his spare time, he is president of the Eastern Esperanto Federation, whose meeting this is. Simmons is happy to tell anyone that, until , when he chanced to see a book on the subject, he had never heard of Esperanto.

But it was love at first sight. Yet his attempts to pass on his enthusiasm have almost always fallen on deaf ears.

And not just deaf ears, but ears that are positively closed. They are violently against it. If you say you're going to teach Russian, people might say, 'Oh, that's a waste of time', and just forget it. But they will go on at you for ages about why you shouldn't teach Esperanto. Apart from anything else, Esperanto is a great basis for learning other languages. That is also true of Latin.

But Latin takes a long time to learn, whereas Esperanto doesn't. I became fluent in two years. Don't forget, he designed it for uneducated farm-workers who had 10 minutes a day. Bialystok in the s was no place to grow up.

A city in the north-east of what is now Poland, it was at the time under Russian rule. Violence between ethnic Poles, Russians, Germans and Jews was commonplace, and every week brought fresh news of barbarism and cruelty between these isolated and mutually intolerant communities. It was here, where lack of understanding translated readily into racial hatred, and racial hatred begat violence, that, in , Ludovic Zamenhof was born to a language teacher and her linguist husband.

By his mid-teens, young Ludovic had seen enough of man's inhumanity to man to convince him of the need for a common language that would facilitate understanding between peoples. Having been brought up to speak Polish, German, Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, and having a good knowledge of English and French, Zamenhof knew that no existing language would fit the bill.

For one thing, the fact that they were associated with a particular country, race or culture meant that they lacked the neutrality any international language would need in order to be accepted. And, for another, the fact that they were weighed down by copious rules, yet at the same time were riddled with illogicalities and exceptions, meant that they lacked another essential characteristic of a universal second language: This difficulty factor also ruled out Latin and classical Greek - all of which left Zamenhof with only one option: But inventing languages doesn't pay the bills, so Zamenhof studied medicine and became an oculist.

By day he fixed eyes and in the evening he wrestled with problems that would make a poet weep. How rigid should he be in his pursuit of simplicity? Was it possible for Shakespeare in translation to sound like Shakespeare?