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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Hmm... I think you have a very simplified overview of Japanese.
For starters, "46 syllables" might be misleading. I think the technical term for sound units in Japanese is "moras". I think this distinction is important because some of the characters shouldn't always be said as a complete "syllable" in all cases to create natural sounding speech. I'll go on to explain "dipththongs" in a second which will also give an example of why this is important.
Also, there might be 46 characters on each chart (of katakana and hiragana), but slight altercations makes the sounds of some of them change drastically. You have tenten's and maru's to deal with, which adds 25 more characters to hiragana and even more to katakana.
Also, all kanji can be converted to hiragana or katakana. Hiragana and Katakana provide a general example on how to say certain words.
Moving on to vowel sounds, there are things called "dipththongs". That would entail, for example, an "ah" sound mixed with an "eeee" sound to make a sound like "eye". An "ehh" sound mixed with an "eee" sound could make something close to "A". The list goes on, but my point is there are more than "5 vowels" in my opinion. This also reveals that Japanese characters aren't syllables because an あ+い wouldn't be "two" syllales in the English language-- but rather just one to make a sound like "eye" (approximately of course).
As far as grammar being more simple than English or French... I really wouldn't know. English grammar comes natural to me as I am a native... I have certainly come to a slight conclusion that there are more patterns in Japanese speech than in English speech, but as foras which one is complex goes, I don't know (because I've never completely approached English as a learner of it). As far as "no singular or plural" goes, that is not always true. There are plenty of words to indicate plurality (like counters, which don't exist as ferquently in English) as well as some straight up plural forms of words. These are of course very few when compared to English. Moving on to the idea that there are no "male/female" words... that may be true. If you're talking about how like in Spanish they say "la phone" or whatever (indicating the phone is feminine) then you might be right. There are definitely speech patterns and words that indicate whether the speaker is male or female though-- much more so than English in my opinion. There is also speech that indicates age, status of the listener, status of the speaker, etc. In that sense I think it is pretty complex to think about all at once.
Another thing, approaching the language as a Westerner might be difficult because the language is so tied in with the culture. European culture might be relatively easy for an American to pick up. Like-wise American culture might be easy for a European to pick up. For us to learn Japanese culture, however, it is probably more challenging. While I don't think it'd be smart to assume anything when approaching a foreign language, you could probably get away with doing more assuming when learning English as a European or learning a European language as an English spaeker than learning Japanese as a Westerner.
I've heard people say that learning spoken Japanese is easier than learning to read or write... I think I would agree with that. I personally think that holds true for all languages though. That might just be exposing a deficiency on my part though!