colloquial japanese

[...]... for a visiting Japanese trade delegation you exchange business cards and practise your few words of Japanese You are surprised to discover that you can identify some of the kanji used to write the visitors’ names The Japanese guests are impressed and flattered by your efforts to learn Japanese As you listen to the tape follow the text carefully to see if you can identify any of the Japanese characters... about the pitch accent of Japanese There is considerable regional variation in pitch tolerated within the definition of kyootsuugo or ‘the common language’ Words of foreign origin Japanese has borrowed many words from foreign languages, particularly from English It is important to pronounce these words with the modifications they have undergone to accommodate them to the Japanese sound system and not... English, or other, pronunciation As the Japanese writing system permits only very restricted consonant sequences, many loan-words in Japanese end up with more syllables than they have in their original languages, e.g supúun ‘spoon’, fóoku ‘fork’, gasorin sutándo ‘gasoline stand (petrol station)’ Pronunciation practice 1 Listen carefully to the pronunciation of these famous Japanese brand names, then try repeating... Subaru (Súbaru) Mitsubishi (Mitsúbishi) Toshiba (Tooshiba) Mazda (Matsuda) 6 Now listen to these Japanese words which have been borrowed into English Notice the difference between the Japanese and English pronunciations karate sashimi (sashimí) karaoke tsunami ikebana (ikébana) kabuki origami (orígami) Now some Japanese place names: Yokohama Okinawa Hiroshima Fukuoka (Fukúoka) Nagoya (Nágoya) Nagano (Nágano)... some time in the tenth century Japanese is still written with a combination of these three separate writing systems Kanji are used for writing most nouns, and the roots of verbs and adjectives They are used in their pseudo-Chinese pronunciation (called the on-reading) to convey the sounds of words borrowed from Chinese and in the nativeJapanese, kun-reading to write original Japanese words This means that... acquire a thorough grounding in Japanese in a relatively short time 9 The primary focus of the course is on the spoken language It is indeed possible to work through the book without attempting to learn the written language at all One the other hand, if your goal is to be able to read Japanese as well as speak it, it is important that you familiarise yourself with the Japanese script as early as possible... should be taken merely as a guide to the pronunciation of Japanese and an aid to help you remember the vocabulary All the grammatical points are explained with romanised examples and all the glossary entries are given in both Japanese script and romanised transliteration We recommend, however, that serious students should at least learn the two Japanese syllabaries, hiragána and katákana You acquire... of the material without looking at the romanised versions If literacy in Japanese is your ultimate goal you must get into the habit of reading and writing the Japanese script Don’t fall into the trap of romanising everything before you try to work out what it means Your aim should always be the comprehension of written texts as Japanese, not the laborious decoding of a series of abstract signs to produce... added to indicate the pitch accent The following descriptions of Japanese sounds are approximations based on the pronunciation of south-eastern British English The vowels Japanese has five short vowels a, e, i, o, u and five long vowels romanised here aa, ee, ii, oo and uu The short vowels are all the same length, very short and crisp, giving Japanese its characteristic staccato rhythm a e i o u like the... ‘speaking of …’ Of course, it is used far more frequently in Japanese than we would use these expressions in English Notice, too, that the particle wa is written with the hiragána symbol for ha, This is one of the rare cases in which the kana spelling reflects an earlier stage of the Japanese language and does not coincide with the modern Japanese pronunciation The particle to , ‘with’ or ‘and’ is . y0 w0 h0" alt="" Colloquial Japanese The Colloquial Series Series Adviser: Gary King The following languages are available in the Colloquial series: Afrikaans * Japanese Albanian. 35th Street, New York NY 10001, USA. COLLOQUIAL CD-ROMs Multimedia Language Courses Available in: Chinese, French, Portuguese and Spanish Colloquial Japanese The Complete Course for Beginners. hiragána, katakána and kanji 306 Japanese English glossary 312 Index of grammar and language functions 383 Preface In this completely new edition of Colloquial Japanese, we have integrated