Long vowel

2007-07-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

In Japanese, when two or more vowels follow each other directly, the sequence is regularly pronounced as a continuum. Example aa represents a + a pronounced without break. It indicates long vowel.

Example: a is pronounced as a in "father" but here a is pronounced shortly.

Japanese Pronunciation

2007-06-24T09:49:00.002-07:00

The first step to learning Japanese is understanding the basic pronunciation of the words. Speaking properly is very important in Japan. Hence, I would try my best to post videos with native Japanese speakers so we would have a model.

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Here is the vowel pronunciation:

Introduction: Japanese Language

2007-06-24T07:55:00.001-07:00

Japanese Language (Nihongo) is a language spoken by over 130 million people, in Japan and Japanese emigrant communities around the world. 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 person mentioned in conversation. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and has a lexically distinct pitch-accent system. Early Japanese is known largely on the basis of its state in the 8th century, when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled; but smaller amounts of material, primarily in scriptional, are older. The earliest attestation of Japanese is in a Chinese document from 252 A.D.

The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: Chinese characters, kanji, and two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana. The Latin alphabet, rōmaji, is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when inputting Japanese 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 loans 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 Holland in the 17th century, Dutch has also been influential, with words like bīru (from bier; "beer") and kōhī (from koffie; "coffee").

Let's Learn Japanese

Long vowel

Japanese Pronunciation

Introduction: Japanese Language