日本語 - Nihongo - Japanese!

Japanese was the very first foreign language I decided to study. It started in high school because anime and manga was popular at the time. While I was not very much into the media, I started to learn the language simply to have somewhere to fit in; I wanted to be the translator. After so long, I found that I really liked it, and it stuck.

I. What is it?

The classification of Japanese is under heated debate, but for the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to it here as a Japonic language. This describes the language family utilized by the people who live on the archipelago of Japan and its emmigrant communities. It has a long standing history and relationship with Chinese and other languages of the Pacific Islands. The earliest attested form of Japanese appears in the Nara period, between AD 710 - 794. That gives Japanese a life of a little over one thousand years. Pretty impressive!

II. How does it work?

Japanese is primarily a syllabic language. The writing system is comprised of characters foreign to the Latin alphabet (which is what we English speakers use); each character represents not a "letter," but a "syllable," distinguishing the writing system from an "alphabet."
The writing system is the focal point of Japanese and is what makes it such an exotic language to the western world. There are three forms of this writing system:

- Hiragana 「ひらがな」: This is the first syllabic system. These characters have only the phonetic value; no meaning is attached to them. It's the primary form of writing and will appear the most often. Notice that there are four characters. Each represents one syllable, as aforementioned: 「ひ」Hi「ら」 ra「が」 ga「な」na.

- Katakana 「カタカナ」: This is the second syllabic system. It's secondary to hiragana; its main uses are for foreign or borrowed words or names, or (if you notice how blocky it looks) is sometimes used as a form of emphasis, similar to italics in Latin alphabets. This system functions in exactly the same fashion as hiragana, but only looks different. Hiragana may be written in katakana and vice-versa.

- Kanji 「漢字」: These are the characters borrowed from Chinese. These characters, by appearance, do not belie their phonetic value, but instead have meaning in them. These characters are often used in combination with hiragana; the kanji will show the meaning while the hiragana will, in certain cases, show the pronunciation. There are two characters that illustrate the meaning: 「漢」, written as 「かん」('kan') in hiragana, and means "China." The other, 「字」is written as 「じ」('ji') in hiragana and means "character." Thus, the two characters together literally mean "Chinese character."

III. Anything peculiar about it?

The peculiar thing about Japanese is that, syntaxically, it's strikingly different from English. It stands as one of the more difficult languages to learn for English speakers solely for that reason. As many other East Asian languages, Japanese is primarily a "topic-comment" type of language, with your main verb coming at the end of the sentence. What? That's crazy talk! But that's how the language works and that's what makes it so tricky for us to learn it. Implication is heavy as well. The golden rule of Japanese: If you can imply it in context and it's obvious from that, do not say it.
Lastly, another striking difference between English and Japanese is that Japanese has the ability to illustrate a huge difference in levels of politeness in the way you word a sentence. The same thing can be expressed in several different ways and still retain its meaning, but changes its formality. A few quick examples:

明日は、受験。
("Ashita wa, juken.")
Colloquial translation: "Tomorrow, I have an exam." Or: "Tomorrow, there is an exam."
Literal translation: "Tomorrow, exam."
Notice the complete lack of pronouns and even no verb! This is why both colloquial translations are possible; it's the context that will determine which is more accurate.

一緒にお茶を飲みませんか。
("Issho ni ocha wo nomimasen ka.")
Colloquial translation: "Won't you have some tea with me?"
Literal translation: "Together tea not have?"
Notice again the lack of pronouns (you, me) in the literal translation, and also notice that it makes almost no sense in English.

待て！
("Mate!")
Literal and colloquial translation: "Wait!"
This is probably the most informal way to say this to someone. Say it like this only to your close friends! (Even then, it might be a bit rude, depending on the situation.)

待ってください。
("Matte kudasai.")
Literal/Colloquial translation: "Please wait."
Obviously a little nicer than the above.

お待ちなさい。
("Omachinasai.")
Lit./Coll. translation: "Wait."
While the translation looks the same as the first, it's actually a highly formalized way to say this. If you used this with your close friends, they'd probably raise an eyebrow or two at you.

IV. What do I like about it?

The heavy implication of the language, the way you go about wording things and the amount of control you have over how politely you may address someone are the biggest factors. Likewise, Japanese is capable of implying a lot of very little nuances that English cannot through little words and expressions, sometimes even through simply not saying something. Interesting indeed!

V. Difficulty in learning it?

In truth, Japanese is not all that difficult, despite the way I've been making it look previously. The best way to simplify Japanese is to learn how to drop your mindset as an English speaker; you cannot say the English things in your head with Japanese. Instead, you have to say things in Japanese with a Japanese mindset. There isn't a whole lot to it other than that!

• Things that make your life hard

1. The writing systems. There are three, though hiragana and katakana are not that troublesome. It's kanji that scare people away. There are about 2,000 characters that you have to know to be literate in Japanese. That's absurd! But it's not as hard as you might think! It will be discussed in the easy section.
2. Dropping your English-speaking mindset. That's not easy for everyone to do. It takes practice, and that's where immersion can help!

• Things that make your life easy

1. Kanji actually have patterns. There are "pieces" of each kanji, called "radicals." There are not so many radicals, and kanji are composed of them. If you learn the radicals, you can learn how to "spell" kanji, which helps learning them quite a bit.
2. Japanese is an agglutinative language, which means no noun cases! Particles instead show how each word functions in a sentence.
3. Verbs do not conjugate for number or person; only tense and voice, which makes learning conjugations a lot easier.
4. Verb forms are highly regular. There are only two irregular verbs in the language!

VI. Sample text:
基本的に翻訳は訓練してないから出来ないとは言うなら、正しい翻訳よりも例文として自然な表現を目指すという目標が掲げられると、これはなかなか病みつきになる体験かもしれない。

("Kihonteki ni honyaku wa kunren shite'nai kara dekinai to wa iu nara, tadashii honyaku yori mo reibun to shite shizen na hyougen wo mezusu to iu mokuhyou ga kakagerareru to, kore wa naka naka yamitsuki ni naru taiken ka mo shirenai.")

"Basically if you say you can't because you don't translate, when you set your sights on a sentence that is more natural but not as correct as the first, your personal experience may be that you are addicted to this."

Links:

NicoNico Douga - Japanese Youtube!
Yomiuri - International news site