Learning Japanese can be quite a challenge. One hurdle is that in Japanese there's a masculine and a feminine register. There are certain words and expressions that only men would use, and others that only women would use.
In Japanese there are also four (yes, four) levels of politeness, in the following order:
1. blunt
2. plain
3. polite
4. really polite
And it's not just a few words here and there. The conjugation of verbs varies according to the level of politeness.
In theory you're supposed to use the correct level for the right occasion. You might think that, to play it safe, the best thing to do would be to go for level 4 at all times, but that sounds really odd to Japanese ears. (Same thing with bowing. If you bow all the time to everyone, people might think you're making fun of them.) A better option would be to go for level 3, which is what most people do.
The good news is that, as a foreigner, Japanese people sort of expect you to mess it up, and they let it slide. Another good thing is that Japanese is relatively easy to pronounce, especially if you speak Spanish or Italian.
If it was written in some sort of phonetic alphabet (like Korean, for example), that would be a good starting point. But no. Not only they use Chinese characters, thousands of them, which are already a nightmare, but they found a way to complicate even that.
In Chinese, the vast majority of characters have just one pronunciation, and only a handful of characters have two or more. In Japanese it's the reverse. Most characters have at least two or three different pronunciations, and very often more (many more), which vary depending on what precedes or follows that character. I'll give you an example.
Let's take a relatively simple and very common character: 生.
In Chinese it's pronounced shēng, and it can have several meanings:
- to give birth, or being born
- life, or living
- raw, or uncooked, or fresh
- student
Whatever the meaning, it's always pronounced shēng.
In Japanese it means pretty much the same thing, but these are the possible pronunciations, depending on the context:
- sei
- shō
- i
- u
- umare
- o
- ha
- ki
- nama
And it doesn't end there. If that character is part of someone's surname, which does happen, then there are a further nine (9) pronunciations. Let me give you another example. Let's take this Japanese sentence:
三月一日は日曜日で祝日、晴れの日でした。
It simply means:
"March 1st was a Sunday, a holiday and a sunny day."
As you can see, the character 日, which means day, appears five times. In Chinese that character is pronounced rì. In Japanese, in that sentence, each one of the five has a different pronunciation, which are respectively:
- tachi
- nichi
- bi
- jitsu
- hi
And they all mean exactly the same thing. It makes you want to slash your wrists.
In the 16th century a few Jesuit missionaries went all the way to Japan, in an effort to bring the word of our Lord Jesus Christ to the godless heathens. The very first three to arrive were Francisco Xavier, Alessandro Valignano and Francisco Cabral.
Given that the godless heathens couldn't even speak Latin (what's the matter with them?), the three attempted to learn Japanese. It soon dawned on them what they got themselves into.
In a letter to Rome, reporting on the progress of their evangelization, Xavier wrote that the Japanese language must've been planted there by the Devil in order to frustrate the spread of Christianity. If that's the case, it certainly worked.
