Quote:
Originally Posted by NightBird
I took some little informations about Japanese language...
Are these things are right?
- Hiragana and Katakana have both 46 syllabes...
(ka, ki, ku, ke, ko…)
- Kanji have officially 1945 characters, also called "Jouyou Kanji"
- Some Kanji can be converted to Hiragana/Katakana
- Grammar is much more simply than English/French
- No "singular/plurial"
- No "male/female" words
Do I missed something?
Oh yeah...
Mhhh can't write already but...
(is it right? [Nothing is possible/Impossible is impossible])
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"Jouyou Kanji" are "commonly-used kanji". There are other kanji lists, like the "Jinmeiyou Kanji", which contain additional characters that can be used for personal names.
The "Jouyou Kanji" has been updated recently, and the new list is expected to be announced on 30 November 2010. Which is today, but it might have happened a couple hours ago due to time zones. The new list has a total of 2136 kanji.
Japanese grammar is far more predictable than the irregular monstrosity that is English, but it has some complexities of its own, such as keigo (honourable speech), null subjects, heavy use of particles, subtleties in the progressive tense, passive, causative, volitional, potential, and conditional forms, the ability to chain multiple modifying phrases into one long sentence, and other stuff that tends to confuse native English/French speakers.
There are hardly any grammatical genders in Japanese ("Le Soleil", "He", etc.), but there are differences between male and female patterns of speech. The distinction is usually not present in grammar though.
「無理はいけません 」 means something along the lines of "(Doing) impossible (things) is no good." or "Don't do unreasonable things." If said to a sick person, it can be expressed more colloquially as "Don't push yourself."
"Nothing is impossible!" would be more along the lines of 「不可能なことは存在しない！」 or 「不可能なことは存在しません。」 if you are speaking to 'strangers'.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NightBird
Euh xD
So the quote is wrong...
I also heard this... is it true?:
- Only 5 vowel sounds
- Only 2 verb tenses: present and past
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Strictly speaking, there are only five vowel sounds, but vowels are slightly nasalized when adjacent to the nasal consonants [n] or [m], and are heavily nasalized when occurring before 「ん」. Japanese also has a distinctive pitch accent (「高低アクセント」,think of it as a 'lite' version of the Chinese tonal pitch), so vowels may also occur in 'high' or 'low' pitches.
It's better to think of the tenses as 'past' and 'non-past', since the 'future' tense is also included in the 'non-past' tense.
It's still technically incorrect, but I'll refrain from further discussion as it would only confuse you further.