Learn in your Car - Japanese - The Complete Language Course
Brand New - 9 CDs and 3 Books
Simple, yet effective, LEARN IN YOUR CAR Japanese teaches key words first, then builds grammar and new vocabulary into sentences. Your ability to comprehend and converse is developed within an amazingly short period of time.
You will rapidly join the millions of people who can arrange hotels, order in restaurants, change money, and feel more at home when traveling abroad or communicating with strangers.
This audio course is economical, easy to use while driving, walking or working around your home. The audio was prepared by dialect-free professionals and includes grammar basics learned through recorded examples.
This course includes a total of 9 hours of audio. There are 3 booklets with complete recorded text in English and Japanese.
Includes 3 levels.
Level One introduces key words, numbers, phrases, sentence structure, and basic grammar. Level Two teaches more challenging vocabulary, more grammar, more complex sentences, generating confidence in your ability to comprehend and converse. Level Three offers expanded vocabulary, advanced grammar, and complex sentences to fine-tune your conversational skills.
About the Language
Japanese is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages. There may exist relationships with other languages, but they have still remained undemonstrated. It is an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of speaker, listener and the third person mentioned in conversation whether he is there or not. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. It is a mora-timed language.
The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: modified Chinese characters called kanji, and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana. The Latin alphabet, romaji, is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when entering Japanese text into a computer. Western style Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino-Japanese numerals are also commonplace.
Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loanwords from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created from Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late 19th century, Japanese has borrowed a considerable number of words from Indo-European languages, primarily English. Because of the special trade relationship between Japan and first Portugal in the 16th century, and then mainly the Netherlands in the 17th century, Portuguese, German and Dutch have also been influential.
Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and sometimes still is spoken elsewhere. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of the Chinese mainland, the Philippines, and various Pacific islands before and during World War II, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programs. As a result, there are many people in these countries who can speak Japanese in addition to the local languages. Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil) sometimes employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 5% of Hawaii residents speak Japanese, with Japanese ancestry the largest single ancestry in the state (over 24% of the population). Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Argentina, Australia (especially Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Cairns), the United States (notably California, where 1.2% of the population has Japanese ancestry, and Hawaii), and the Philippines (particularly in Davao and Laguna). Their descendants, who are known as nikkei (literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently after the second generation.
Japanese is the de facto official language of Japan and in Palau, in the island of Angaur. Standard Japanese is the common language. This normative language was born after the Meiji Restoration (happy pie, meiji ishin?, 1868) from the language spoken in the higher-class areas of Tokyo for communicating necessity. Hyojungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications, and is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.
Formerly, standard Japanese in writing ("literary language") was different from colloquial language. The two systems have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until about 1900; since then kogo gradually extended its influence and the two methods were both used in writing until the 1940s. Bungo still has some relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in bungo, although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). Kogo is the predominant method of both speaking and writing Japanese today, although bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect.
Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan. The profusion is due to many factors, including the length of time the archipelago has been inhabited, its mountainous island terrain, and Japan's long history of both external and internal isolation. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, inflectional morphology, vocabulary, and particle usage. Some even differ in vowel and consonant inventories, although this is uncommon.
The main distinction in Japanese accents is between Tokyo-type and Kyoto-Osaka-type (Keihan-shiki), though Kyushu-type dialects form a third, smaller group. Within each type are several subdivisions. Kyoto-Osaka-type dialects are in the central region, with borders roughly formed by Toyama, Kyoto, Hyogo, and Mie Prefectures; most Shikoku dialects are also that type. The final category of dialects are those that are descended from the Eastern dialect of Old Japanese; these dialects are spoken in Hachijo-jima island and few islands.
Dialects from peripheral regions, such as Tsushima, may be unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country. The several dialects of Kagoshima in southern Kyushu are famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects elsewhere in Kyushu as well. This is probably due in part to the Kagoshima dialects' peculiarities of pronunciation, which include the existence of closed syllables (i.e., syllables that end in a consonant, such as /kob/ or /ko/ for Standard Japanese /kumo/ "spider"). A dialects group of Kansai is spoken and known by many Japanese, and Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy. Dialects of North Kanto are associated with typical farmers.
The Ryukyuan languages, spoken in Okinawa and Amami Islands that are politically part of Kagoshima, are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family. But many Japanese common people tend to consider the Ryukyuan languages as dialects of Japanese. Not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryukyuan languages.
Recently, Standard Japanese has become prevalent nationwide (including the Ryukyuan islands) due to education, mass media, and increase of mobility networks within Japan, as well as economic integration.
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