Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment.
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 (大和言葉 or infrequently 大和詞, i.e. "Yamato words"), which in scholarly contexts is sometimes referred to as wago (和語 ...
The Japanese language makes use of a system of honorific speech, ... In business settings, ... The general rule is that a younger family member (e.g., a young brother ...
The Japanese language has a system of honorific speech, referred to as keigo (Japanese: 敬 （ けい ） 語 （ ご ）, literally "respectful language"), parts of speech one function of which is to show that the speaker wants to convey respect for either the listener or someone mentioned in the utterance. Their use is widely seen in a ...
Japanese children are taught to act harmoniously and cooperatively with others from the time they go to pre-school. This need for harmonious relationships between people is reflected in much Japanese behavior. Many place great emphasis on politeness, personal responsibility and working together for the universal, rather than the individual, good.
The Japanese government provides standardized tests to measure spoken and written comprehension of Japanese for second language learners; the most prominent is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), which features five levels of exams (changed from four levels in 2010), ranging from elementary (N5) to advanced (N1). The JLPT is offered ...
Easy Japanese (やさしい日本語, yasashii nihongo) refers to a simplified version of the Japanese language that is easy to understand for children and foreigners who have limited proficiency in the Japanese language by using simple expressions, simplified sentence structure, and added furigana (kana indicating pronunciation) to kanji characters.
The Western Japanese Kansai dialect was the prestige dialect when Kyoto was the capital, and Western forms are found in literary language as well as in honorific expressions of modern Tokyo dialect (and therefore Standard Japanese), such as adverbial ohayō gozaimasu (not *ohayaku), the humble existential verb oru, and the polite negative ...