Japan Language

Japanese is believed to be linked to the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian and other languages, but also shows similarities to Austronesian languages like Polynesian.

Writing:
The Japanese writing system consists of three different character sets: Kanji (several thousands of Chinese characters) and Hiragana and Katakana (two syllabaries of 46 characters each; together called Kana). Japanese texts can be written in two ways: In Western style, i.e. in horizontal rows from the top to the bottom of the page, or in traditional Japanese style, i.e. in vertical columns from the right to the left side of the page. Both writing styles exist side by side today.

Grammar:
Basic Japanese grammar is relatively simple. Complicating factors such as gender articles and distinctions between plural and singular are missing almost completely. Conjugation rules for verbs and adjectives are simple and almost free of exceptions. Nouns are not declinated at all, but appear always in the same form.

Pronunciation:
In comparison with other languages, Japanese knows relatively few sounds, and pronunciation poses little problems to most learners. The biggest difficulty are accents, which do exist, but to a much lower extent than in the Chinese language. In addition, there are relatively many homonyms, i.e. words that are pronounced the same way, but have different meanings.

Levels of speech:
Different words and expressions are used when talking to an unknown person or a superior, as opposed to when talking to a child, family member or a close friend. For instance, there are more than five different words for the English word "I", which are used depending on the context. For formal situations, a honorific language level (keigo) is still in common use.

Kanji

Kanji, one of the three scripts used in the Japanese language, are Chinese characters, which were first introduced to Japan in the 5th century via Korea.

Kanji are ideograms, i.e. each character has its own meaning and corresponds to a word. By combining characters, more words can be created. For example, the combination of "electricity" with "car" means "train". There are several ten thousands of characters, of which 2000 to 3000 are required to understand newspapers. A set of 1945 characters has been officially declared as the "kanji for everyday use".
Before the introduction of Chinese characters, no Japanese writing system existed. When adopting the characters, the Japanese did not only introduce the characters' original Chinese pronunciations, but also associated them with the corresponding, native Japanese words and their pronunciations. Consequently, most kanji can still be pronounced in at least two ways, a Chinese (on yomi) and a Japanese (kun yomi) way, which considerably further complicates the study of the Japanese language.

Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. But unlike the Chinese language, Japanese cannot be written entirely in kanji. For grammatical endings and words without corresponding kanji, two additional, syllable based scripts are being used, hiragana and katakana, each consisting of 46 syllables.
Calligraphy is the art of writing beautifully. 

Hiragana
Around the 9th century, the Japanese developed their own writing system based on syllables: Hiragana and katakana (together: Kana). Of the two kana systems, hiragana is more cursive while katakana characters are more angular.

Hiragana and katakana each consist of 46 signs which originally were kanji but were simplified over the centuries. When looking at a Japanese text, one can clearly distinguish the two kinds of signs: the complicated kanji and the simpler kana signs.

Among the syllables are the five vowels (a i u e o). The rest are syllables combined by one of these vowels with a consonant (ka ki ku ke ko ra ri ru re ro...). One exception is the n.

In addition, most syllables can be slightly changed by adding two small strokes or a small circle in the top right corner next to the character. For example, ha changes to be with the addition of two small strokes, or to pa with the addition of a small circle.
Even though one can theoretically write the whole language in hiragana, it is usually used only for grammatical endings of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, as well as for particles, and several other original Japanese words (in contrast to loan words that are written in katakana) which are not written in kanji.

Hiragana is the first of all the writing systems taught to Japanese children. Many books for young children are, therefore, written in hiragana only.

Katakana

Katakana is mainly used for writing loan words and the names of persons and geographical places that can't be written in kanji.