About Japanese Language

Ranking of Japanese

Japanese is the official language (in a practical but not legal sense) of Japan, which boasts the world’s third-largest GDP. There are about 125 million native speakers of Japanese, making it ninth in the world in terms of the native-speaking population (*1).

Most Japanese speakers live in Japan, but there are also communities of native speakers in the continental United States, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Hawaii, and other places.

Characteristics of Japanese

Among the languages of the world, Japanese is generally considered to be a difficult language to learn, but that does not mean every aspect of it is difficult. Below are some characteristics of the Japanese language.

1. Pronunciation
Japanese has only five vowel sounds and few consonants. Moreover, the words are still understandable even if the intonation is a little off, so it is a language that even beginners can easily communicate in.

2. Characters
Three kinds of characters (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) are combined when writing, so reading and writing are not easy. In particular, there are more than 2,000 kanji in regular use. Learning these is one of the major obstacles to studying Japanese.

3. Grammar
Japanese grammar is not necessarily difficult compared to other languages, but it does differ greatly from English and other European languages. It is a subject-object-verb language with the verb at the end of the sentence, and another characteristic is that its verbs are highly regular. Grammatically, Japanese is similar to Turkish and Korean.

Usefulness of Japanese

Japan is a major economic power with the world’s third-largest GDP (as of 2015), and Japanese companies have branches all over the world. There is also an enormous domestic market with few people in Japan who can speak English and other foreign languages, so Japanese-language abilities give foreign nationals in Japan a major advantage in business, sightseeing, and other areas. At the same time, Japan has an abundance of world-class resources in terms of history, tradition, and culture. Japanese skills are essential for those who are interested in these fields and wish to gain a deeper understanding.

In recent years, the expansion of offshore operations, including system development and customer support; diversification of the tourism business; strengthening of economic ties between countries; and other factors have led to increasing demand for Japanese-speaking human resources outside of Japan as well. For example, this year Vietnam decided to introduce Japanese-language education—placing it as a primary language on par with English—in response to strengthened economic ties between the two countries. For that reason, a particularly large number of Japanese companies have set up operations in Vietnam, and Japanese-language ability will likely be a major advantage for job applicants in Asia and other places that emphasize local hiring.

Reference information
1. Meeting minutes and distributed materials from the 1 3th Meeting of the Curriculum Subcommittee and Foreign Languages Subcommittee; Primary and Secondary Education Working Group; Central Council for Education; Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo3/015/siryo/06032707/005/001.htm

Read more about Japanese recruitment information, see Japanese-Jobs.com ( https://jp.japanese-jobs.com/en).