Japanese language
Japanese (日本語) "Nihon-go" or "Nippon-go" in Japanese) is the language spoken on the island nation of Japan, in East Asia. A theory about its origin is that Japanese, Mongolian, and Turkish come from the same family of Altaic languages.
In English, the order of the words is very important. For example, the sentences "Is it?" and "It is." mean different things. In Japanese a lot of these differences are made by adding or changing the endings of words. So a Japanese word has a stem called a "body", and additional parts (called "suffixes"). By changing the suffix you can change the meaning of the word.
Japanese has five vowel sounds that can have two different lengths. They are "ah, ee, oo, eh", and "o". Lengthening a vowel changes the meaning of the word: "ojisan" (おじさ', uncle) and "ojiisan" (おじいさ', grandfather). Japanese has a sound which is like the English "L" sound, but it is also like the English "R" sound. (That is why it can be difficult for many Japanese to learn to make both "L" and "R" sounds when they speak English.) Japanese has a sound which is not common in English which is usually written "Tsu". Also, "o" and "u" can either be short or long. For example, "benkyousuru" （べ'きょうする）(to study).
In Japanese, the verb is at the end of the sentence, and the subject is at the beginning. In many sentences there is no subject. The listener can guess what the subject is by thinking about the context and the form of the verb.
In Japanese, Japan is called "Nihon" (日本), and the Japanese language is called "Nihongo" (日本語) (-go means "language"). Nihongo also means Japanese. Sometimes, the words "Nippon" and "Nippongo" are also used, but today these words are thought of as more nationalist, while "Nihon" is a more neutral word. The kanji characters of the word mean "sun-root", and that is because Japan is often called "The Land of Rising Sun".
Writing system.
The Japanese language uses three writing systems. The first two are "hiragana" (ひらがな) and "katakana" (カタカナ). "Hiragana" is for writing words from inside Japan. "Katakana" is mostly for writing sound effects and words from outside of Japan. Both writing system have symbols that mean a syllable. "Katakana" has straighter edges and sharper corners than "hiragana". "Hiragana" has more curves than "katakana".
There is a third way to write, called "kanji" (漢字), where every word or idea has a picture character taken from Chinese. To be able to fully read Japanese, students must learn around 2,000 "kanji". Many "kanji" are made up from smaller, simpler "kanji". "Kanji" have different sounds when used in different ways, but each "kanji" still has only certain ways it can be read.
Written Japanese has no spaces between words, so "kanji" help separate words in a sentence.
Sentences in Japanese are done like this: subject, object, verb. For example, "I ate an apple today" (今日、私はり'''$べました) would be in this order "Today, I apple ate."
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