• Spoken by over 130 million people, Japanese is an agglutinative language characterized by a complex system of honorifics, which guides verb formation and vocabulary choice based on the relative status of speaker and listener. The language's vocabulary is heavily influenced by words borrowed from Chinese and several different Indo-European languages including English.

  This page contains resources for learning and studying the Japanese language.

• Fast Facts

  1. Language Family: Japonic
  2. Number of Speakers: 130 million
  3. Official Language: Japan
  4. Major Dialects: Tokyo-type; Kyoto-Osaka-type
  5. • Hiragana
  6. • Katakana (primarily used for foreign words)
  7. • Kanji (Chinese characters)

• Common Words and Phrases

  • Good morning: Ohayo gozaimasu
  • Good day: Konnichiwa
  • Bye: Sayonara
  • How are you?: O genki desu ka?
  • Thank you: Domo arigato
  • I am sorry: Gomen nasai
  • Do you speak English?: Anata wa eigo o hanashimasu ka?
  • My name is ___: Watashi no namae wa ___ desu
  • How much is it?: Sore wa ikura desu ka?
  • It's beautiful: Kirei desu
  • Hello (on telephone only): Moshi moshi

• Related Mahalo Pages

  Yakuza | Japanese Food | Sushi | Sushi Restaurants | Sake | Wasabi | Hirohito | Korean | Mandarin Chinese | Tagalog | French | Spanish | Russian | German

Categories

• View History
• Discuss on the Message Board
• Embed this Page
• Share this page