It is the official language of Japan and vast majority of it’s people estimated to be about 120 million speak Japanese. Ranked as a popular language worldwide, it is also a second language for some Chinese and Korean people. Besides native words, Japanese vocabulary consists of words from Chinese, English and some Asian languages. The origin of Japanese language is not known and it is considered as a part of Japanese language family. Since no major written literature and documentation is found, its origin and evolution is not clear. Some linguists consider is as a part of Altaic family. Although Korean and Chinese languages are said to be akin to Japanese language however former has major differences in vocabulary while later is different in grammar.
Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana (the wavy one), katakana (the boxy one) and Kanji (Chinese characters). It can be either traditionally written vertically or horizontally similar to English. Before the introduction of Chinese characters (called Kanji) in later part of the 5th century, Japanese was strictly a spoken language. It is ‘agglutinating’ language which means much information in contained in the verb (no verb conjugation though) itself without needing helping verbs as in English. Nouns used in Japanese language have no gender, articles or numbers. It is not a tonal language unlike other Asian languages which makes pronunciation easier.
