"gh" as in "enough," "o" as in "women," "ti" as in "station."
Second clue: yes, it swims in the sea!
Japanese, by contrast, can involve four different scripts. It can occasionally be written in the Roman alphabet (known as romaji), such as in textbooks or other material for foreigners or in certain advertising, but generally uses two phonetic scripts based on syllables (hiragana and katakana, collectively known as kana) in combination with characters derived from Chinese (known as kanji). Whereas phonetic scripts are based on sound, characters are based primarily on pictures or ideas, though confusingly they can in many cases also have phonetic elements and multiple pronunciations. It is this relatively complex and unfamiliar writing system, not the spoken language, that provides the major challenge for Westerners in learning Japanese to any truly advanced level.
1.1.3 Grammar
There are a number of significant differences between English and Japanese grammar—that is, the rules of language.
Whereas English is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language ("the dog bit the boy"), Japanese is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) ("dog boy bit"). In terms of the world's languages, there are approximately equal numbers in both categories, so it cannot be said that Japanese is unusual in this regard.
English usually relies on word-order or sometimes change of word-form to distinguish subject and object (e.g. "he" is the subject, "him" is the object), but Japanese primarily uses particles to do this. A particle is a short word (such as wa, ga or o) that is not always translatable in itself but is used as a sort of suffix to indicate the grammatical role of the word it follows. Among other things particles can convey similar meaning to that produced in English by articles such as "the" or "a," which do not exist as such in Japanese. English has articles, Japanese has particles.
Other differences the English speaker will encounter include greater conceptual and grammatical overlap between verbs and adjectives, the frequent omission of pronouns, the frequent omission of indication of plurality or singularity, the absence of verb conjugation according to person (restricted in English relative to, say, French, but still found in "I see, she sees" and the verb "to be"), the absence of a dedicated future-only tense, the structure of subordinate clauses, and a greater sensitivity to politeness. Many of these differences boil down to Japanese generally being less explicit and specific than English.
TABLE 1a: Key grammatical differences between Japanese and English
| ENGLISH | JAPANESE |
| subject-verb-object | subject-object-verb |
| articles (a, the) | particles (ga, wa) |
| some verb change according to person/number | no verb change according to person/number |
| dedicated future tense | no dedicated future tense |
| pronouns almost always used | pronouns often omitted |
| relative clauses follow item | relative clauses precede item |
| pronouns show subj./obj. (he/him) | pronouns unchanged |
| not especially politeness-sensitive | very politeness-sensitive |
| frequent explicitness | frequent implicitness |
1.1.4 Socio-cultural context
To a considerable extent languages reflect the cultures in which they are embedded, and in turn the particular worldview and ordering of life characteristic of that culture. In other words, as many theorists argue, your language helps shape the way you interpret the world. If there is a significant dislocation between your first language and the surrounding culture in which you find yourself, feelings of alienation can arise, as can happen with immigrants or travelers. And because both culture and language are dynamic, this feeling of alienation can even occur in your native country—the generation gap is such an example.
Since Japanese culture is markedly different in many regards from English (or Anglo) culture, this will be reflected in language usage. What is "right" is often a matter of convention, or what anthropologists call ritual. All languages have ritualized elements, which have a socio-cultural meaning beyond or different from their literal meaning. For example, are you really enquiring about a person's state of health when you greet them with "How are you?" Similarly, when Japanese meet early in the morning (before around 10 a.m.) they will say Ohayō gozaimasu meaning literally "It's early." (We will discuss the letter ō in Part Two.) They do not expect a reply such as "Thank you for letting me know. I hadn't realized." Such a reply would almost certainly be deemed grossly sarcastic.
In terms of degree the Japanese language is considerably ritualized. In a given situation, the balance between the obligation to use conventionalized language, and the freedom to do or say "your own thing," is more likely to incline to the former than an English speaker might expect.
The English speaker will also note in particular that despite substantial recent socio-cultural changes Japanese is still a significantly rank-oriented and gender-differentiated language. References to the self often differ from the English. So do insults and metaphors. For example, insults and oaths involving references to private parts of the body or religious icons and so forth do not necessarily carry any weight in Japanese, where good old-fashioned idiocy is the main theme of insults.
Basically, word associations, language usages and conventions that may be broadly shared within the Anglophone world, and indeed more broadly much of the West, are not necessarily the same in Japan.
1.2 Who speaks Japanese?
We look here at the native speakers of Japanese, and those who learn it as a second or other language.
1.2.1 Native speakers
Japanese is obviously spoken by native Japanese in Japan, who comprise some 98% of the 127 million Japanese-speaking population. In addition, it is spoken (or maintained) as a "heritage language" by more than a million people from Japanese emigrant families, notably in areas with a significant ethnic Japanese population such as Hawaii, parts of California and, to a lesser extent, certain parts of South America. Many children of Korean and Chinese immigrants in Japan also speak Japanese as their first language even though they may not be Japanese citizens.
In total, roughly 125-130 million people speak Japanese as a mother tongue or close to it. This contrasts with the approximately 835 million native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (the language with the most native speakers), and 325 million or so native speakers of variants of English (the most widely spoken language).
Though it is not designated as one of the United Nations' six official languages (in alphabetical order: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), it ranks ninth in the world in terms of the number of native speakers (after Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, English, Bengali, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese).
Japanese is also becoming increasingly prominent as an internet language.
FIGURE 1c: "Top Ten" language (in millions of speakers)
1.2.2 Non-native speakers and students
Those who study Japanese as a Second or Other Language are sometimes referred to as JSOL speakers.
Partly due to Japan's prominence as an economic superpower Japanese is now studied widely around the world—though admittedly not to the same degree as English, which has become a truly international language with more than a billion non-native students. At any given time there are about 2 million people studying Japanese, with a general rate of increase of around 5% per year. As many as 100,000 students, mainly from Asia, go to Japan each year for language study in one form or another. And in countries with significant