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Vocabulary, Grammar, and Present systems + Ways

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Types of writing and there descriptions:
Kanji-Every character has a meaning and various pronunciations.
Hiragana-A character per syllable (ideogram) that represents a sound in a cursive style writing. This was originally used by women.
Katakana-Angular strokes that represent sounds, when the character themselves don't covey meaning. The writing used to only be for men, but now it is used for foreign words and names.
Xiangxing-This is a pictogram writing that was originally of animals on concrete. They evolved into characters and changed over time.

Zhishu-Are ideograms that were created when pictograms did not work because of abstract ideas. They are representative symbols that arose and sometimes had different meanings.
Xingsheng-These are composite phonetics that mean "form plus sound."

Jiajie-These are any borrowed characters that sometimes have the similar meanings.

Quick Grammar Rules
1. no gender words
2. no declensions
3. no plurals
4. nouns do not join
5. verbs and adjectives join in tense

The Japanese language had two writing systems; Chinese characters and syllabaries. The syllabaries are words that represent a syllable. Once you have enough syllabaries you create words.

The sentence order is important in the grammar system. For the Japanese sentence order was subject, object, and following with the verb. It is the same as the Germans. The difference from the English language is that the English sentence order is subject, verb, and then object. Between the two, the verb and object switches. In the Chinese language, the sentence order was subject, verb, object. It is the same order as the English language, therefore easier to pick up.

The Chinese characters:
50,00 characters exist.
8,000 characters are currently used.
1,500-2,000 characters are known for literacty.

Japanese Basic's to language:
The Japanese language is close to the Chinese language in writing, but not speaking.
There are two phonetic alphabets; Hiragana & Katakana (A third is the Roman alphabet, but it is not used that much)
When written horizontally, the writing goes left to right.
When written vertically, the writing goes right to left.

Politness
You can speak in many polite or impolite ways. In Japanese, you have forms of spoken language:


Intimate-used at home, or everyday
Polite-speaking to well educated company
Honorific-respect for elders or superiors

Check out www.maikoworks.com to see some examples of current day writing