For Westerners, Japanese Proves Hard to Master

What kind of language is it that has suddenly become so hot, so eagerly sought after by Americans hoping for greater understanding of the economic powerhouse across the Pacific?

The origins of spoken Japanese are shrouded in uncertainty, and it appears to be unrelated to any other language. However, some scholars see links to Korean, which has a similar grammar. Others point to similarities to the Altaic family of languages, which includes the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic tongues.

But the Japanese generally point with pride to the unique nature of their language and often say that it is too difficult for most foreigners to learn.

* Unlike the Chinese languages, Japanese lacks tones, and all syllables of a word are usually given equal stress.

* There is no declension of nouns and pronouns, and their grammatical relationships are made clear by “particles”-- ka, wa, no, go, wo, for example--that follow the nouns and pronouns.

* Verbs, which are generally placed at the end of sentences, are inflected.

* There is no plural form--one kimono, two kimono, for example--and the number of a noun must be understood from the context.

And that’s just the spoken language. When one approaches written Japanese, things begin to get difficult:

* Japan’s original writing system-- kanji, or Chinese characters--was borrowed from China starting about 1,700 years ago. The characters are ideographs, representing concepts, not sounds.

* About 1,300 years ago, the Japanese developed two distinct phonetic writing systems, each with 50 characters. One is the graceful, flowing hiragana, used for writing Japanese words; the other is the angular katakana , used for writing foreign words. These two systems are used along with the Chinese characters, in part to indicate the syllables that form the suffixes and particles that are integral parts of Japanese but cannot be written in kanji.

* Increasingly since the opening of Japan to the West more than a century ago, the Roman alphabet--called Romaji in Japan--has been used, in part to make Japanese more accessible to foreigners. The good news for foreigners is that after World War II the Japanese government ordered simplification of many of the more complex Chinese characters and a limit to the number in common use.