NI HO N GO

今回の presentation が結構大作になって、頑張ったので
その成果を見てっ！（文法、単語、語彙のミスがあると思う…）
難しいSubjectでもあり、カナリ調べました。
引用しました。（笑
でも、このlevelで学んだGrammerやvocabularyを
盛り込まないといけないし、２回目だから前回の指摘点も
考慮しつつ、大変でした。

I’m talking about "NI HO N GO (Japanese Language)."

First, I’m explaining why this subject was chosen. When I traveled some countries, I met some people were studying Japanese. Actually I have met a few people also in this school. From young ages, we were using Japanese so that naturally. However, when teaching Japanese for the foreigner, it is sometimes difficult, and I don’t know how to teach in right Japanese. As for the language which we are using daily, a dialect, slang, the abbreviation, and the vogue word are in use. Never before have I learned about Japanese in English. I thought that I would learn about Japanese. I hope this presentation subject is good for you and me.

Japanese is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is said that the Japanese language is the ninth most spoken language in the world.

The Japanese writing system comes from Chinese, although the languages spoken by the Japanese and Chinese are completely different.

While the Chinese use their characters or ideograms to write each and every word, the Japanese devised two separate forms of phonetic script, called kana, to use in combination with Chinese characters. The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of glyphs. At times the written language also contains roman letters, for example, in acronyms such as IBM, product numbers, and even entire foreign words, so that a total of four different scripts are needed to write modern Japanese, especially for things such as company names, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer. Chinese characters, called kanji in Japanese, are actually ideograms, each one of which symbolizes a thing or an idea. It is common for one kanji to have more than one sound. In Japan, we are used to write both words of Chinese origin and native Japanese words.

There are two forms of syllabic kana script, hiragana and katakana. These forms were transformed from the Chinese characters.

Hiragana used to be mainly written by women in olden times. It consists of 48 characters and is used for writing native Japanese words, particles, verb endings, and often for writing those Chinese loanwords that cannot be written with the characters officially approved for general use.

Katakana is also a group of 48 characters. It is chiefly used for writing loanwords other than Chinese, for emphasis, for onomatopoeia, and for the scientific names of flora and fauna.

Both kinds of kana are easier to write than the full forms of the original Chinese characters from which they were taken.

A large number of local dialects are still used. While standard Japanese, which is based on the speech of Tokyo, has been gradually spreading throughout the country under the influence of media such as radio, television, and movies, the dialects spoken by the people of Kyoto and Osaka, in particular, continue to flourish and maintain their prestige. My hometown is Ibaraki, near Tokyo, we’re not standard Japanese. We are using local dialect.

Speakers of Spanish and Italian will find that the short vowels of Japanese — a, i, u, e, o — are pronounced very similarly to the vowels of those languages. However, Regrettably I do not understand which is similar by Spanish pronunciation.

Long vowels — aa, ii, uu, ei or ee, oo — are produced by doubling the length of the short vowels, although ei is often pronounced as two separate vowels. The distinction between short and long vowels is crucial, as it changes the meaning of a word.

The consonants are k, s, sh, t, ch, ts, n, h, f, m, y, r, w, g, j, z, d, b, and p. The fricative sh , as in English “shoot”, along with the affricates ch, ts, and j , as in English “charge,” “gutsy,” and “jerk,” respectively, are treated as single consonants. The g sound is always the hard g of English “game,” not that of ”gene.”

A major difference from English is that Japanese has no stress accent, equal stress is given each syllable. And whereas English syllables are sometimes elongated, in Japanese, strings of syllables are spoken with the regularity of a metronome. Like English, Japanese does have a system of high and low pitch accents.

As for basic structure, the typical Japanese sentence follows a pattern of subject – object - verb. For example, “Taro ate an apple” is in English. “Taro ga ringo o tabeta” literally means “Taro an apple ate.”

I cannot do explanation of the detailed grammar beyond this by being difficult. If you want to study Japanese, please learn by yourself. 

The Japanese have developed an entire system of honorific language, called keigo, that is used to show a speaker’s respect for the person being spoken to. This involves different levels of speech, and the proficient user of keigo has a wide range of words and expressions from which to choose, in order to produce just the desired degree of politeness. A simple sentence could be expressed in more than 20 different ways depending on the status of the speaker relative to the person being addressed.

Deciding on an appropriate level of polite speech can be quite challenging, since relative status is determined by a complex combination of factors, such as social status, rank, age, gender, and even favors done or owed. In general, women tend to speak a more polite style of language than men, and to use it in a broader range of circumstances. Mastery of keigo is by no means simple, and some Japanese are much more proficient in it than others.

Finally, the principal language is Japanese and Japan does not have second language. These days , there are many schools which perform English education from kindergarten and an elementary school and pre-school. However, I think that English education organization of Japan is not enough. The kids may be able to understand English, but I think that there are few kids who can actually talk even if it increases. It’s because there is no opportunity to speak in Japan, just only in school. So I think that English should just turn into the secondary language in Japan.

Anyway, I’m pleased if you can get interested in Japanese. If you want to learn Japanese, I think Calligraphy, I used to do, is one of the best way