Teach Yourself Complete Japanese - 2 Audio CDs and 432 pages
Everyone says Japanese is a difficult language to learn, so it must be, musn't it? Let me reassure you. There are aspects of the Japanese language that are surprisingly straightforward: There is no masculine and feminine in Japanese and most words don't have a plural. Verb endings remain the same regardless of who does the action: kaimasu can mean I buy, he buys or we buy . There are only two main tenses – the past and the present/future: kaimasu covers buy and will buy , kaimashita means bought . Pronunciation is relatively easy and very regular.
So you aren't going to be grappling with a lot of complex grammar rules when you start learning Japanese. Of course, much of the vocabulary is new, but even in this aspect there is a pleasant surprise – the Japanese language has always been a great ‘word borrower’ and it is rich with loanwords from English, for example, aisukuriimu (ice cream), kompyuta (computer). Even if you have never studied Japanese before, because of the huge economic and cultural influence that Japan has had worldwide you will almost certainly already be familiar with many Japanese words and terms such as: karaoke , origami , sumo , sushi and manga . There are more challenging aspects to learning Japanese, but this is the case when you learn any language, and it is often these challenges that give the greatest satisfaction. And you certainly won't be alone in your quest to master Japanese – about 3 million people worldwide are currently learning Japanese.
Complete Japanese aims to help you to interact with Japanese people through a range of everyday situations. It is an in-depth self-study course that will take you from beginner's to intermediate-level Japanese via a logical step-by-step approach. By the end of the course you will feel confident enough to speak, read and understand Japanese in a wide range of practical situations.
Table of Contents:
About the course
Pronunciation guide
Unit 1: How do you do? I’m called Robert Franks
Unit 2: I watch TV everyday
Unit 3: Let’s do some shopping!
Unit 4: Where is the cinema?
Unit 5: That person is famous you know!
Unit 6: How was your trip?
Unit 7: I want to be an astronaut!
Unit 8: I like living a Japanese lifestyle! End of section 1 Review
Unit 9: On Saturdays I get up at about 10 and have a leisurely breakfast
Unit 10: What are you doing at the moment?
Unit 11: Before we drink this wine, let’s drink something like beer!
Unit 12: Let’s have a go at reading katakana!
Unit 13: I have had the experience of living abroad
Unit 14: I’m thinking of going to America next year
Unit 15: Please don’t go into that meeting room
Unit 16: End of Section 2 Review
Unit 17: Intransitive and transitive verb pairs
Unit 18: Modifying nouns
Unit 19: Causative and passive
Unit 20: Conditional
Unit 21: Introduction to honorific language
Unit 22: Review of section 3
Brand new edition - more lively and up to date .
New audio recording with top Japanese voice-overs.
All three Japanese scripts taught...
...but student can learn spoken language using only roman script.
Cultural information in every unit
About the Author
Helen Gilhooly has lived and worked in Japan, and has a PGCE and an MA in Japanese. She is a university teacher trainer, language materials writer and senior director at a specialist language college in the UK.
About the Japanese Language
Japanese is a language spoken by over 130 million people, in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and has a lexically distinct pitch-accent system.
Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loans from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created from Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late 19th century, Japanese has borrowed a considerable number of words from Indo-European languages, primarily English. Because of the special trade relationship between Japan and first Portugal in the 16th century, and then mainly Holland in the 17th century, Portuguese and Dutch have also been influential. German linguist, Johann Joseph Hoffmann noticed the systematic relationship between Japanese, Mongolian and Manchu language and wrote a book in the 19th century.
The original language of Japan, or at least the original language of a certain population that was ancestral to a significant portion of the historical and present Japanese nation, was the so-called yamato kotoba , which in scholarly contexts is sometimes referred to as wa-go. In addition to words from this original language, present-day Japanese includes a great number of words that were either borrowed from Chinese or constructed from Chinese roots following Chinese patterns. These words, known as kango (漢語), entered the language from the fifth century onwards via contact with Chinese culture, both directly and through the Korean peninsula. According to some estimates, Chinese-based words may comprise as much as 60%–70% of the total dictionary vocabulary of the modern Japanese language and form as much as 18%–40% of words used in speech.
The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: Chinese characters called kanji , and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana . The Latin alphabet, rōmaji , is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer. Western style Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino-Japanese numerals are also commonplace.
A much smaller number of words has been borrowed from Korean and Ainu. Japan has also borrowed a number of words from other languages, particularly ones of European extraction, which are called gairaigo. This began with borrowings from Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by borrowing from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Edo period. With the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French and English. Currently, words of English origin are the most commonly borrowed.In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese roots and morphology to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Koreans imported many of these pseudo-Chinese words into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Like Latin-derived words in English, kango words typically are perceived as somewhat formal or academic compared to equivalent Yamato words. Indeed, it is generally fair to say that an English word derived from Latin/French roots typically corresponds to a Sino-Japanese word in Japanese, whereas a simpler Anglo-Saxon word would best be translated by a Yamato equivalent.
|
