Japanese language
Kanji and hiragana
Japanese is the national language of Japan, spoken by over 125 million people.
It uses three writing systems: hiragana and katakana (syllabic scripts) and kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese).
Japanese is grammatically unrelated to Chinese despite the shared characters, and its origins remain debated.
The language features elaborate systems of politeness and formality that shift based on social context: She spoke to her boss in formal Japanese.
- kanjiChinese symbols in Japanese
- hiraganaJapanese phonetic alphabet
- romajiJapanese in Latin letters
- katakanaJapanese phonetic writing system
- honorificsRespectful name additions
Chinese characters · loan words · phonology · agglutination · idioms · morphology · syntax · particles · onomatopoeia · waka · verb conjugation · proverbs · grammar · vocabulary · pronunciation · origami · bowing · Nihongo
- JapanTokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Mount Fuji, Hokkaido
- CJK LanguagesChinese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, hanzi
- Japanese Taiwancolonial era, Formosa, police system, colonial courts, colonial architecture
Japanese languageEnglish
Britain's native tongue
Spanish · Portuguese · Arabic · Swahili · Zulu
Japanese languageMandarin Chinese
Official language of China
Chinese · Korean · Cantonese · Vietnamese · Mongolian