Your Quick Japanese Language Guide: Origins, Alphabets, Honorifics, Grammar

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Japanese is one of the most popular modern languages to learn. Whether it’s the food, the fashion, the pop culture, or any number of other aspects of Japanese culture, millions of people around the world are jumping into Japanese language learning. So can you!

Japanese has many aspects to get familiar with, so this guide offers an overview to the origins of Japanese, writing systems, important honorifics, and basic grammar rules. After reading, you might be ready to learn Japanese yourself. With just 10 minutes per day, you can progress through bite-sized lessons, read stories, and practice your pronunciation with our TruAccent speech recognition engine to become an excellent Japanese language speaker!

Overview of the origins and history of the Japanese language

There is no other language quite like Japanese in the world. Every language is unique in its own way, but Japanese is considered a language isolate. That means Japanese is its own language family—the Japonic language family—which includes Japanese dialects and the native language of the southernmost region of the Japanese archipelago.

Prior to the eighth century A.D., Japanese existed as only a spoken language with no writing system. At that time, the Chinese written language was adopted for use as a new Japanese writing system known as kanji (漢字). By the end of the ninth century A.D., the Japanese “alphabets”—hiragana (平仮名) and katakana (片仮名)—were developed based on kanji. Both of these writing systems are native to Japanese and are not used in any other language.

So, is Japanese a hard language to learn? Is Japanese an easy language to learn? It depends on the individual, but it’s important to note that just because it’s unique doesn’t mean it’s difficult to learn.

Here are a few things that set Japanese apart:

• While Japanese does have three writing systems, Japanese pronunciation is straightforward since each sound is pronounced the same way no matter what word it appears in.
• There are no capital letters.
• If Japanese sounds fast, that’s because it is. It’s one of the fastest languages in the world, with an average of about 7.84 syllables per second! 

Japanese alphabets and writing systems

Japanese has three writing systems, each with their own uses: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Most Japanese sentences are made up of all three, and differentiating them is the first step to reading Japanese.

Hiragana and katakana: the Japanese alphabets

Japanese has “characters” instead of “letters,” and hiragana and katakana are the two phonetic writing systems that most closely resemble a Japanese alphabet. They are each composed of 46 characters with identical pronunciations. This means that, even though they look different, they sound exactly the same when you speak the characters out loud.

Hiragana is primarily used for native Japanese words, such as arigatо̄ (ありがとう, thank you), or for grammatical components like verb conjugations. It’s also used as a standard to show how to read Japanese words written in other writing systems.

Meanwhile, katakana is primarily used for loanwords or gairaigo (外来語). When a word borrowed from another language is adopted into Japanese, you would write it in katakana. The same rule applies to names of people and countries.

Kanji: Chinese characters

The Japanese written language is based on the Chinese written language, and the borrowed characters are still known today as kanji, which literally means “Chinese letters.” As the two languages have developed separately since kanji’s introduction to Japan, some Japanese language kanji differ slightly in their modern iterations. However, many meanings remain the same.

As for what a kanji is, a single character encompasses everything from names to nouns to numbers. Their pronunciation or “reading” can be difficult to sort out at first, but a general rule of thumb is that if a kanji is by itself, it uses kun’yomi (訓読み), which is the native Japanese reading without Chinese influence. If a word is composed of multiple kanji back-to-back, it usually uses on’yomi (音読み), which is a Japanese word influenced by the original Chinese word. 

In this example sentence, the singular kanji use the native Japanese readings while those with two characters use the adapted Chinese readings.

• Watashi wa chikatetsu ni notteimasu.（私は地下鉄に乗っています。）= I am boarding the subway.

Being polite in Japanese

Having good manners in Japan goes beyond physical gestures and cultural awareness. Understanding how to be polite using the Japanese language is also important whether you’re traveling there or meeting someone in your hometown. It all starts with a good first impression and the right greeting.

Greetings in Japanese

One of the first things you’ll learn in any new language is how to say “hello.” Many Japanese greetings, or aisatsu (挨拶), are equivalent to familiar expressions used in English.

There are also other greetings used in specific situations that require you to have some understanding of Japanese culture. The expression yoroshiku onegaishimasu (よろしくお願いします) is one such example as it has many different interpretations depending on the context. It can mean, “Nice to meet you!” on the first day of school, “Thank you in advance!” when asking for a favor, and more. Knowing greetings like these will not only polish your Japanese etiquette, but it will also help you to sound more fluent!

Japanese honorifics

Rather than cordially addressing someone you just met by their first name, it’s customary in Japanese to call someone by their surname followed by an honorific suffix. Whether the conversation is casual or formal, Japanese honorifics are short words similar to “Mr.” and “Ms.” that attach to the end of names. For example, if you meet a man whose surname is Takeda, you might first greet him as Takeda-san (武田さん), which is the generic, gender-neutral title.

There are many honorifics, some which are highly specific, but here are a few of the most common:

Japanese formal speech

One of the trickier aspects of the Japanese language you’ll learn is its additional grammar rules and vocabulary for formal situations. This set of rules is broadly known as keigo (敬語)  or “honorific language.” This is different from the set of honorifics that are suffixes such as -san and -kun, although the most respectful honorifics, like -sama, are often used alongside keigo.

Knowing when to use formal versus informal speech in Japanese takes time to understand intuitively, but in most cases, keigo is used in the workplace. Customers are greeted respectfully at a department store, employees at a large business speak humbly before clients, and so on. 

Within keigo, there are three subcategories, which are:

• Teineigo（丁寧語）: Formal language most similar to everyday Japanese, using standard polite conjugations with some slightly more formal nouns.
• Sonkeigo（尊敬語）: Honorific language that holds the listener in exceptionally high regard with special conjugations and some unique vocabulary.
• Kenjōgo（謙譲語）: Humble language where the speaker uses special conjugations and some unique vocabulary to place themselves below the listener linguistically.

Basic Japanese language grammar

Many aspects of Japanese grammar will be familiar to a native English speaker, such as recognizable parts of speech and punctuation marks. However, there are more rules that set it apart, which speaks to the uniqueness and complexities of the Japanese language

Word order and sentence structure in Japanese

The core Japanese word order differs from English. Rather than placing the verb in the middle of the sentence or clause, you’ll put the Japanese verb at the end. This is called an “SOV” (“subject-object-verb”) word order. Beyond that, Japanese word order is quite flexible!

Generally speaking, the words in a complete Japanese sentence alternate between full words you could find in a dictionary (like nouns and verbs) and a short word or grammatical component, known as a “particle,” that helps identify the roles of the words around it. It’s like using blocks to build a structure that forms the sentence.

While some Japanese parts of speech do have somewhat established places in a sentence (such as verbs going at the end of a clause), others can be moved within the sentence without drastically changing the meaning. We do this in English, too!

Both of the sentences below have nearly identical meanings with a slight variation in connotation:

• Shichi-ji ni yuki to satsuki wa toshokan de sūgaku o benkyо̄ shimasu.（七時にゆきとさつきは図書館で数学を勉強します。）= At 7:00, Yuki and Satsuki will be studying math at the library.
• Yuki wa satsuki to shichi-ji ni toshokan de sūgaku o benkyо̄ shimasu.（ゆきはさつきと七時に図書館で数学を勉強します。）= Yuki will be studying math with Satsuki at the library at 7:00.

Japanese verbs and verb conjugation

Sentences in Japanese are incomplete without a verb. The verbs are split into three categories based on the last character of the verb:

• Godan verbs: also known as u-verbs, always end in a character with an “u” sound at the end.
• Ichidan verbs: also known as ru-verbs, always end with the character ru (る).
• Irregular verbs: only include the verbs for “to do” (suru, する) and “to come” (kuru, 来る).

Just as Japanese has multiple levels of formality, so do Japanese verb conjugations. The standard Japanese verb conjugation is known as masu-form, which is named for the ending of the present affirmative form. You’ll find this is the most polite type of conjugation to use.

Meanwhile, “plain form” (also known as “dictionary form” or “short form”) is used for casual speech and for certain grammatical structures. It has its own set of conjugations.

Japanese adjectives

To describe a noun in Japanese, adjectives are added before the noun (like in English) or before the conjugated “to be” to say something “is” a particular adjective.

• Amai tabemono ga suki desu.（甘い食べ物が好きです。）= I like sweet food.
• Kono tabemono wa amai desu.（この食べ物は甘いです。）= This food is sweet.

Like verbs, Japanese adjectives have conjugations, but unlike verbs, the conjugations are much simpler. How they are conjugated depends on what type of of adjective they are:

• i- adjectives: always end in the character i (い).
• na– adjectives: include the character na (な) before a noun.

The conjugations in this chart are only used if the adjective is not directly paired before a noun and is separated like “[noun] is [adjective]”

Particles

Japanese particles are short words in a sentence that identify parts of speech and other grammatical components. Visually, they separate words to make it easier to identify where one word ends and another begins, which is convenient in a language without spaces. 

Although there are dozens of Japanese particles, you’ll see three different particles demonstrate how they function in context in this example:

• Watashi wa resutoran de bangohan o tabemashita.（私はレストランで晩ご飯を食べました。）= I ate dinner at a restaurant.

Japanese numbers and counters

Counting numbers and counting objects in Japanese are two different things. Listing numbers in Japanese is simple: You just assign a word and kanji to each numeral.

When using Japanese counters to count objects, using the number on its own isn’t enough. Instead, suffixes are added to the end of the number to qualify what is being counted.

While there are hundreds of Japanese counters, a small handful of them will get you by in most situations. In many cases, the pronunciation of the number or suffix changes slightly when the suffix is added, but there are patterns to help you remember. The first unit in Rosetta Stone’s App covers a variety of counters used for people, small items, books, and animals!

Key takeaways about the Japanese language

• Japanese is its own language family, making it unique from every other major language.
• There are three writing systems in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
• There are nine parts of speech in Japanese, seven of which have nearly identical counterparts in English.
• Japanese has multiple styles of speech and conjugations based on how formal a conversation is.