Japanese

Japanese is a syllabic language. There is only one free-standing consonants. Everything else is open syllables. Japanese is spoken by more than 127 million people, outside Japan mainly in the USA and Brazil.

Modern Japanese is written in Kanji, which are derived from Chinese script and form the word stem as logograms, syllabaries known as Hiragana and Katakana and the Latin alphabet, known as Rõmaji in Japan. These scripts have different specific functions and are used in parallel in day to day texts. At school, Japanese children learn around 1945 characters; the most comprehensive compendium contains more than 50,000 characters, of which "only" around 10,000 are used in Eastern Asia.

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Language courses Japanese

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Did you know that ...

...there are no street names in Japan and house numbers do not follow any logical system? To find their way around, strangers to an area can enquire at a Koban (police station) to ask who lives where and how best to get there.

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