Japan (Lonely Planet, 11th Edition) - Chris Rowthorn [664]
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WRITTEN JAPANESE
Japanese has one of the most complex writing systems in the world, which uses three different scripts – four if you include the increasingly used Roman script, romaji. The most difficult of the three, for foreigners and Japanese alike, is kanji, the ideographic script developed by the Chinese. Not only do you have to learn a couple of thousand of them but, unlike in Chinese, many Japanese kanji have wildly variant pronunciations depending on context.
Due to the differences between Chinese and Japanese grammar, kanji had to be supplemented with a ‘syllabary’ (an alphabet of syllables), known as hiragana. And there is yet another syllabary, which is used largely for representing foreign loan-words such as terebi (TV) and biiru (beer); this script is known as katakana. If you’re serious about learning to read Japanese you’ll have to set aside several years.
If you’re thinking of tackling the Japanese writing system before you go or while you’re in Japan, your best bet would be to start with hiragana or katakana. Both these syllabaries have 48 characters each, and can be learnt within a week, although it’ll take at least a month to consolidate them. Once in the country, you can practise your katakana on restaurant menus, where such things as kōhii (coffee) and kēiki (cake) are frequently found. Practise your hiragana on train journeys, as station names are usually indicated in hiragana (in addition to English and kanji).
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ROMANISATION
The romaji used in this book is based on the Hepburn system of romanisation. In addition, common Japanese nouns like ji or tera (temple) and jinja or jingū (shrine) are written without an English translation.
Silent Letters
Hepburn romaji is a direct system of Romanisation that doesn’t fully reflect all elements of spoken Japanese. The most obvious of these is the tendency in everyday speech to omit the vowel ‘u’ in many instances. In this language guide, and in Useful Words & Phrases Click here, these silent letters have been retained to provide accuracy in the written Romanisations, but they have been enclosed in square brackets to aid accurate pronunciation.
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LANGUAGE BOOKS
Lonely Planet’s Japanese Phrasebook gives you a comprehensive mix of practical and social words and phrases that should cover almost any situation confronting the traveller to Japan.
If you’d like to delve deeper into the intricacies of the language, we recommend Japanese for Busy People for beginners, Introduction to Intermediate Japanese (Mizutani Nobuko) for intermediate students, and Kanji in Context (Nishiguchi Koichi and Kono Tamaki) for more advanced students. One of the best guides to the written language, for both study and reference, is Kanji & Kana (Wolfgang Hadamizky and Mark Spahn).
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PRONUNCIATION
Unlike other languages in the region with complicated tonal systems, such as Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai, Japanese pronunciation is fairly easy to master.
The following examples reflect British pronunciation:
a as in ‘father’
e as in ‘get’
i as in ‘macaroni’
o as in ‘bone’
u as in ‘flu’
Vowels appearing in this book with a macron (or bar) over them (ā, ē, ō, ū) are pronounced in the same way as standard vowels except that the sound is held twice as long. You need to take care with this as vowel length can change the meaning of a word, eg yuki means ‘snow’, while yūki means ‘bravery’.
It is important to make the distinction between single and double consonants (pp, tt etc), with a slight pause before a double. Other consonants are generally pronounced as in English, with the following exceptions:
f a softer sound – purse the lips and blow lightly when pronouncing
r halfway between an ‘l’ and an ‘r’
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ACCOMMODATION
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CONVERSATION & ESSENTIALS
The all-purpose title san is always used after a name as an honorific and is similar to saying Mr, Miss, Mrs and