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Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as kango (Japanese: 漢語, pronounced, "Han words"), is a subset of Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or was created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese.
The 1603–1604 bilingual Japanese-Portuguese Nippo Jisho or Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam dictionary is still cited as an authority for early Japanese pronunciation. The year 1604 was at the beginning of the Edo Period and also, as Nakao (1998:37) points out, the date of the first monolingual English dictionary, the Table Alphabeticall .
Large numbers of Chinese words were borrowed into Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese and still form a large and important part of their lexicons. In the case of Japanese, the influx has led to changes in the phonological structure of the language. Old Japanese syllables had the form (C)V, with vowel sequences being avoided.
Many generalizations about Japanese pronunciation have exceptions if recent loanwords are taken into account. For example, the consonant [p] generally does not occur at the start of native (Yamato) or Chinese-derived (Sino-Japanese) words, but it occurs freely in this position in mimetic and foreign words. [2]
Kun'yomi (訓読み, Japanese pronunciation: [kɯɰ̃jomi], lit. ' explanatory reading ' [1] [a]) is the way of reading kanji characters using the native Japanese word that matches the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced.
The pronunciation is encoded using a modified form of the ARPABET system, with the addition of stress marks on vowels of levels 0, 1, and 2. A line-initial ;;; token indicates a comment. A derived format, directly suitable for speech recognition engines is also available as part of the distribution; this format collapses stress distinctions ...
Genki I focuses on beginner-level Japanese, from kana on through adjective and verb constructions, and Genki II continued on to intermediate-level topics. Both books are divided into a Conversation and Grammar section and a Reading and Writing section, each containing their own sets of 23 lessons. Each lesson follows a predictable structure.
For example, the Japanese word for "to do" (する suru) is written with two hiragana: す (su) + る (ru). Katakana are generally used to write loanwords , foreign names and onomatopoeia . For example, retasu was borrowed from the English "lettuce", and is written with three katakana: レ ( re ) + タ ( ta ) + ス ( su ).