Name: 日本語 (The Japanese Language)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:51:08.000Z
Duration: 23 min 54 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Or ❝Nihongo (日本語)❞
as it's called in Japanese.

Japanese has around 126 million
native speakers.

Making it the 9th
most spoken language in the world,

It's spoken mainly in the North-East
Asian nation of Japan.

And also to a limited extent
in some emigrant communities

and among some elderly people
living in Japan's

Japanese belongs to
the "Japonic" language family

which also includes the endangered
"Ryukyuan" languages

its relationship to other
languages is largely unknown.

There are theories that
the Japanese and Korean languages

And there are theories
that Japanese and Korean

Which also includes the Turkic languages,

But, the Altaic language family,
and the connection between

They're hotly debated
and are not generally accepted.

There are also theories,
that Japanese arose from

contact between the language
of the Yayoi people,

who migrated from
the North-East Asian mainland

And the language or languages
of the Jomon people

But, the nature of the language is
that these 2 groups of people

its early history, during the Yayoi period.

Which leaves us very little
evidence of what it was

In the 3rd century CE,
the Yamato state in Japan

established relations with China.
And the next 600 years

would be a period of
heavy Chinese influence.

During which the rulers
and the elite thought that

emulates many aspects of
Chinese culture.

Written Chinese was probably
introduced to Japan

"Classical Chinese became
the first literary language" used by the elite.

Later, "Chinese characters"
began being adapted to "write Japanese."

The earliest examples
we have of Japanese

kanbun was the writing of
Japanese in "Classical Chinese style,"

but were "intended to be
readable in Japanese."

Man'yōgana was a way of
writing Japanese

most of the "characters representing
the phonetic sound" of

The Japanese word for
"mountain" - yama -

was written using
these 2 Chinese characters:

Which means mountain,
which is the character used today?

And not only one Chinese character
was used for each sound.

the syllables "ka" could be
represented by

Writing Japanese characters
phonetically using Chinese characters

must have felt like a lot of
unnecessary hard work.

So, 2 systems of simplified
phonetic characters

in order to simplify the writing process.

These 2 systems were ❝Hiragana (ひらがな)❞
and ❝Katakana (カタカナ)❞

new ❝Kana (仮名)❞ systems was to
annotate ❝Kanbun (漢文)❞ text.

So, that Japanese speakers
could read these classical Chinese

or Chinese style texts
as though they were Japanese.

Chinese characters represented
the meaning of the content words

as well as the grammatical
elements and inflections

Some diacritic marks also indicated how to 
change the word order

This method of annotating
Chinese texts with "Kana"

was the precursor to
the Modern Japanese writing system.

Through this process of
trying to make written Chinese language

a huge amount of Chinese
vocabulary entered Japanese.

字幕リスト動画再生

日本語 (The Japanese Language)

pronunciation

obvious

context

accent