Japanese phrasebook

Japanese nihongo is spoken in Japan, and essentially nowhere else. The language is distinct from Chinese and Korean, although the written form uses Chinese kanji characters, and is not known to be related to any other language.

Grammar

Japanese generally employs a subject-object-verb order, using particles to mark the grammatical functions of the words: watashi-ga hamburger-o taberu, "I-subject hamburger-object eat". It is common to omit subjects and even objects if these are clear from previous context.

Verbs and adjectives conjugate by tense and politeness level, but not by person or number. There is no verb "to be" as such, but the polite copula desu can be used in most cases: John desu ("I am John"), Ringo desu ("This is an apple"), Akai desu ("It is red"), etc. Note that the exact meaning will depend on the implied subject!

The good news is that Japanese has none of the following: gender, declensions or plurals. Nouns never conjugate and almost all verbs are regular.

Reading and writing

Reading and writing Japanese are advanced skills which take years of work to gain much real proficiency. Japanese themselves use three different writing systems of various complexity, two of which (hiragana and katakana) are syllabic and relatively easy to learn with 50 characters each, but the clincher is the set of over 2000 Chinese characters known as kanji. The set of hiragana characters is illustrated below.

There are also several competing systems for rendering Japanese in the Latin alphabet, although the Hepburn romanization system is the most common and is used on Wikitravel as well. Do not be surprised if you see these words romanized differently elsewhere.

O, honorable prefix!

Nearly any Japanese word can be prefixed with the respectful tags o- or go-, often translated with the unwieldy four-syllable word "honorable". A few you might expect o-tosan is "honorable father", o-kami is "honorable God" - and a few you might not - o-shiri is "honorable buttocks". Most of the time, they're used to emphasize that the speaker is referring to the listener, so if someone enquires if after your honorable health (o-genki) it's proper to strip off the honorific and reply that you are merely genki. However, for some words like gohan "rice" and ocha "tea", the prefix is inseparable and should always be used. In this phrasebook, the prefix is separated with a hyphen if it's optional o-kane, and joined to the word if it's mandatory oisha.

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