0_Wizard
I've taken Japanese language classes in the past, but I can really only read English loanwords these days. I've forgotten most of the Hiragana and Kanji.
English loanwords, in particular, have become frequent, and Japanese words from English roots have proliferated.
chosen_Japanese_language_0
Japanese language
chosen_topic_0_Japanese_language
Japanese language
Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. During the Heian period (794–1185), Chinese had considerable influence on the vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) included changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language, and the first appearance of European loanwords. The standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo (modern Tokyo) region in the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th century–mid-19th century).
Kanji
Kanji (; ) are the adopted logographic Chinese characters, that are used in the Japanese writing system. They are used alongside "hiragana" and "katakana". The Japanese term "kanji" for the Chinese characters literally means "Han characters". It is written with the same term and characters in the Chinese language to refer to the character writing system, "hanzi" (). Chinese characters first came to Japan on official seals, letters, swords, coins, mirrors, and other decorative items imported from China. The earliest known instance of such an import was the King of Na gold seal given by Emperor Guangwu of Han to a Yamato emissary in 57 AD.
Chinese characters
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, they are called hànzì (, lit ""Han characters""). They have been adapted to write a number of other languages, including Japanese, where they are known as "kanji" (); Korean, where they are known as "Hanja" (); Vietnamese, in a system known as "chữ Nôm"; and Zhuang, in a system known as "Sawndip". Collectively, they are known as CJK characters. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, and historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.
Furigana
Furigana is most often written in hiragana, though katakana, alphabet letters or other kanji can also be used in certain special cases. In vertical text, "tategaki", the furigana is placed to the right of the line of text; in horizontal text, "yokogaki", it is placed above the line of text, as illustrated below. or  These examples spell the word "kanji", which is made up of two kanji characters: 漢 ("kan", written in hiragana as かん), and 字 ("ji", written in hiragana as じ). Furigana may be added by character, in which case the furigana characters that correspond to a kanji are centered over that kanji; or by word or phrase, in which case the entire furigana word is centered over several kanji characters, even if the kanji do not represent equal shares of the kana needed to write them.
Japanese writing system
The modern Japanese writing system is a combination of two character types: logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements, and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is often considered to be the most complicated in use anywhere in the world.
Hiragana
Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each sound in the Japanese language (strictly, each mora) is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be either a vowel such as ""a"" (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as ""ka"" (か); or ""n"" (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English "m", "n", or "ng" (), or like the nasal vowels of French. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of ん "n"), the kana are referred to as syllabaries and not alphabets.
Katakana
In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is quite similar to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively "gairaigo"); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals, and often Japanese companies. Katakana are characterized by short, straight strokes and sharp corners. There are two main systems of ordering katakana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering, and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.
1_Apprentice
That's really interesting! What made you decide to learn Japanese?
0_Wizard
Well I would love to say that it was because I took a class on Japanese history and prehistory... but in reality, it's because I was sleeping with the Japanese professor.
Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan.
self_Japanese_language_0
Japanese language
self_0_Japanese_language
Paramus, New Jersey
Paramus ( , with the accent on the second syllable) is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough's population was 26,342, reflecting an increase of 605 (+2.4%) from the 25,737 counted in the 2000 Census, which had in turn increased by 670 (+2.7%) from the 25,067 counted in the 1990 Census. A suburb of New York City, Paramus is located northwest of Midtown Manhattan and approximately west of Upper Manhattan. In 2013, it was named as a "New Jersey Healthy Town" under the state's Mayor's Wellness Campaign. Paramus was incorporated as a borough by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 2, 1922, and ratified by a referendum held on April 4, 1922, that passed by a vote of 238 to 10.
SMAP
SMAP was a Japanese boy band, composed of Masahiro Nakai, Takuya Kimura, Goro Inagaki, Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, and Shingo Katori. The group was created in 1988 by music producer Johnny Kitagawa, founder of Johnny & Associates, originally as a six-piece with Katsuyuki Mori, until his departure from the band in 1996. After making their debut in 1991, the group took the Japanese entertainment industry by storm, becoming the most successful boy band in Japanese history and the bestselling band in Asia, often referred to as a "national treasure" and a "fortune and property of the country" in Japan. SMAP was regarded as an iconic figure in Japan, after achieving an unprecedented level of success in numerous genres in the entertainment industry, including music, television, film, radio, and theater, as a group and individually.
Bergen County, New Jersey
Bergen County is the most populous county in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2016 Census estimate, the county's population was 939,151, an increase of 3.8% from the 2010 United States Census, which in turn represented an increase of 20,998 (2.4%) from the 884,118 counted in the 2000 Census. Located in the northeastern corner of New Jersey and its Gateway Region, Bergen County is part of the New York City Metropolitan Area and is directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan, to which it is connected by the George Washington Bridge. Bergen County is divided into 70 municipalities, but has no large cities.
V. Gordon Childe
Vere Gordon Childe (14 April 1892 – 19 October 1957), better known as V. Gordon Childe, was an Australian archaeologist and philologist who specialized in the study of European prehistory. Working most of his life as an academic in the United Kingdom for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London, he wrote twenty-six books and was an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology and Marxist archaeology. Born in Sydney, New South Wales to a middle-class family of English descent, Childe studied classics at the University of Sydney before moving to England to study Classical archaeology at the University of Oxford.
Samurai
In Japanese, they are usually referred to as or . According to translator William Scott Wilson: "In Chinese, the character 侍 was originally a verb meaning "to wait upon", "accompany persons" in the upper ranks of society, and this is also true of the original term in Japanese, saburau. In both countries the terms were nominalized to mean "those who serve in close attendance to the nobility", the Japanese term saburai being the nominal form of the verb. According to Wilson, an early reference to the word "samurai" appears in the "Kokin Wakashū" (905–914), the first imperial anthology of poems, completed in the first part of the 10th century.
History of Japan
The first human habitation in the Japanese archipelago has been traced to prehistoric times. The Jōmon period, named after its "cord-marked" pottery, was followed by the Yayoi in the first millennium BC, when new technologies were introduced from continental Asia. During this period, the first known written reference to Japan was recorded in the Chinese "Book of Han" in the first century AD. Between the fourth century and the ninth century, Japan's many kingdoms and tribes gradually came to be unified under a centralized government, nominally controlled by the Emperor. This imperial dynasty continues to reign over Japan.
Paramus Park
Paramus Park is an enclosed shopping mall that is located on From Road in Paramus, New Jersey, United States. It is located on a plot of land that is bordered by the northbound lanes of Route 17 and the southbound lanes of the Garden State Parkway, approximately two miles from the interchanges of both highways with Route 4. The mall is owned by GGP Inc. and is one of four malls operated by that company in New Jersey along with Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, Bridgewater Commons in Bridgewater, and Woodbridge Center in Woodbridge. Paramus Park has a gross leasable area (GLA) of . Paramus Park is accessible from the northbound Garden State Parkway at exit 163 and at exit 165 in both directions.
1_Apprentice
Wow, that's inappropriate!
0_Wizard
But to be fair, I did also take a class on the History of Japan. It was neat to learn about the Japanese archipelago since prehistoric times.
The first human habitation in the Japanese archipelago has been traced to prehistoric times.
self_History_of_Japan_0
History of Japan
self_5_History_of_Japan
Japanese people
Worldwide, approximately 129 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 125 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live outside Japan are referred to as the , the Japanese diaspora. The term "ethnic Japanese" may also be used in some contexts to refer to particular ethnic groups, including the Yamato (the dominant ethnic group, comprising over 120 million), Ainu, and Ryukyuan people. The Japanese language is a Japonic language that in the past was treated as a language isolate; it is related to the Ryukyuan languages. The Japanese language has a tripartite writing system using Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.
History of Japan
The first human habitation in the Japanese archipelago has been traced to prehistoric times. The Jōmon period, named after its "cord-marked" pottery, was followed by the Yayoi in the first millennium BC, when new technologies were introduced from continental Asia. During this period, the first known written reference to Japan was recorded in the Chinese "Book of Han" in the first century AD. Between the fourth century and the ninth century, Japan's many kingdoms and tribes gradually came to be unified under a centralized government, nominally controlled by the Emperor. This imperial dynasty continues to reign over Japan.
Japan
Japan ( "Nippon" or "Nihon" ; formally "" or "Nihon-koku", meaning "State of Japan") is a sovereign island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asian mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and China in the southwest. The kanji, or Sino-Japanese characters, that make up Japan's name mean "sun origin", and it is often called the "Land of the Rising Sun". Japan is a stratovolcanic archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, which make up about ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area and often are referred to as home islands.
Korea
Korea is a historical country in East Asia; since 1945, it has been divided into two distinct sovereign states: North Korea (officially the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea") and South Korea (officially the "Republic of Korea"). Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by China to the northwest and Russia to the northeast. It is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait and the Sea of Japan (East Sea). Korea emerged as a singular political entity in 676 AD, after centuries of conflict among the Three Kingdoms of Korea, which were unified as Unified Silla to the south and Balhae to the north.
Military history of Japan
The military history of Japan is characterized by a period of clan warfare that lasted until the 12th century AD. This was followed by feudal wars that culminated in military governments known as the "Shogunate". Feudal militarism transitioned to imperial militarism in the 19th century after the landings of Admiral Perry and the elevation of the Meiji Emperor. This led to rampant imperialism until Japan's defeat by the Allies in World War II. The Occupation of Japan marks the inception of modern Japanese military history, with the drafting of a new Constitution prohibiting the ability to wage war against other nations.
Sea of Japan
The Sea of Japan (see below for other names) is a marginal sea between the Japanese archipelago, Sakhalin, the Korean Peninsula and Russia. The Japanese archipelago separates the sea from the Pacific Ocean. It is bordered by Japan, Korea (North and South) and Russia. Like the Mediterranean Sea, it has almost no tides due to its nearly complete enclosure from the Pacific Ocean. This isolation also reflects in the fauna species and in the water salinity, which is lower than in the ocean. The sea has no large islands, bays or capes. Its water balance is mostly determined by the inflow and outflow through the straits connecting it to the neighboring seas and Pacific Ocean.
Wa (Japan)
Japanese is the oldest recorded name of Japan. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scribes regularly wrote "Wa" or "Yamato" "Japan" with the Chinese character until the 8th century, when the Japanese replaced it with 和 "harmony, peace, balance." The earliest textual references to Japan are in Chinese classic texts. Within the official Chinese dynastic Twenty-Four Histories, Japan is mentioned among the so-called "Dongyi" 東夷 "Eastern Barbarians". Note that the following texts are chronologically ordered by date of compilation, which does not always correspond with the sequence of Dynasties in Chinese history.
1_Apprentice
I'm sure it was. What would you say was the most interesting fact you learned?