[Origin of the Japanese Language]
Linguists are still not sure about the origins of the Japanese language. Although it shares many common features with Korean, a relationship between the two languages has not yet been proven. Some think it belongs to the Ural-Altaic language family, like Turkish, but others say that it is similar to a Tamil language. In terms of vocabulary, Japanese borrowed many words from China in ancient times, while today many are taken from English.

[Kanji and Kana]
The Japanese did not have a written form of their language until they encountered Chinese in ancient times. In order to learn from China, a culturally advanced nation ancient Japanese adopted Chinese characters. Kanji are ideograms, which were originally derived from pictograms; for example, the kani meaning “river” consists of three vertical lines which look like streams of water. There are said to be more than 50,000 Chinese characters, 3,000 of which are commonly used, 1,945 of which are taught during the period of compulsory education in Japan. Additionally, Japanese has two sets of phonetic characters, hiragana and katakana, which were created by simplifying kanji in the 9th century to lessen the inconvenience of using it. Both hiragana and katakana have 48 characters each, which represent single syllables.



Let’s practice hiragana and katakana first!
Practice sheet