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What worked: Beginner Textbooks like Genki or Minna No Nihongo, done very quickly. I'm talking like 3 chapters a week for Minna, and maybe 3 chapters per 2 weeks for Genki. Spending a lot of time bogged down in textbooks isn't conducive to actually using the language, but they give you a good base.
- Overview
- Hypotheses of genetic affiliation
- Dialects
- Literary history
Japanese language, a language isolate (i.e., a language unrelated to any other language) and one of the world’s major languages, with more than 127 million speakers in the early 21st century. It is primarily spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago; there are also some 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living abroad, mainly in...
Click Here to see full-size tableJapanese is the only major language whose genetic affiliation is not known. The hypothesis relating Japanese to Korean remains the strongest, but other hypotheses also have been advanced. Some attempt to relate Japanese to the language groups of South Asia such as the Austronesian, the Austroasiatic, and the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, efforts were focused more on the origins of the Japanese language than on its genetic affiliation per se; specifically, linguists attempted to reconcile some conflicting linguistic traits.
An increasingly popular theory along that line posits that the mixed nature of Japanese results from its Austronesian lexical substratum and the Altaic grammatical superstratum. According to one version of that hypothesis, a language of southern origin with a phonological system like those of Austronesian languages was spoken in Japan during the prehistoric Jōmon era (c. 10,500 to c. 300 bce). As the Yayoi culture was introduced to Japan from the Asian continent about 300 bce, a language of southern Korea began to spread eastward from the southern island of Kyushu along with that culture, which also introduced to Japan iron and bronze implements and the cultivation of rice. Because the migration from Korea did not take place on a large scale, the new language did not eradicate certain older lexical items, though it was able to change the grammatical structure of the existing language. Thus, that theory maintains, Japanese must be said to be genetically related to Korean (and perhaps ultimately to Altaic languages), though it contains Austronesian lexical residues. The Altaic theory, however, is not widely accepted.
The country’s geography, characterized by high mountain peaks and deep valleys as well as by small isolated islands, has fostered the development of various dialects throughout the archipelago. Different dialects are often mutually unintelligible; the speakers of the Kagoshima dialect of Kyushu are not understood by the majority of the people of the main island of Honshu. Likewise, northern dialect speakers from such places as Aomori and Akita are not understood by most people in metropolitan Tokyo or anywhere in western Japan. Japanese dialectologists agree that a major dialect boundary separates Okinawan dialects of the Ryukyu Islands from the rest of the mainland dialects. The latter are then divided into either three groups—Eastern, Western, and Kyushu dialects—or simply Eastern and Western dialects, the latter including the Kyushu group. Linguistic unification has been achieved by the spread of the kyōtsū-go “common language,” which is based on the Tokyo dialect. A standardized written language has been a feature of compulsory education, which started in 1886. Modern mobility and mass media also have helped to level dialectal differences and have had a strong effect on the accelerated rate of the loss of local dialects.
Britannica Quiz
Written records of Japanese date to the 8th century, the oldest among them being the Kojiki (712; “Records of Ancient Matters”). If the history of the language were to be split in two, the division would fall somewhere between the 12th and 16th centuries, when the language shed most of its Old Japanese characteristics and acquired those of the mode...
- Masayoshi Shibatani
Twelfth century literature. Brut. Layamon. What were the popular types of literature in the thirteenth century? debates, lyrical ballads, didactic and religious poems. The theme of many religious lyrics was the ______ of life. transience. __________ was an outgrowth of the feudal system. Chivalry.
Lakota ( Lakȟótiyapi [laˈkˣɔtɪjapɪ] ), also referred to as Lakhota, Teton or Teton Sioux, is a Siouan language spoken by the Lakota people of the Sioux tribes. Lakota is mutually intelligible with the two dialects of the Dakota language, especially Western Dakota, and is one of the three major varieties of the Sioux language .
Jan 3, 1999 · Translation is transmittal of that which may be made out of language, but is a condition beyond the grasp of language. “The Trial” is just such a condition. It is a narration of being and ...
It is uncertain if this translation was ever published in book form. Translation of Genesis into the Cherokee language, 1856. Samuel Worcester, and Elias Boudinot, editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, published a revised translation of Matthew in 1829. This was published by the Cherokee National Press, New Echota. In the second edition, published in ...
e'-loi, e-lo'i, la'-ma, sa-bakh-tha'-ni, or (Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthanei): The forms of the first word as translated vary in the two narratives, being in Mark as first above and in Matthew as in second reading. With some perversions of form probably from Psalm 22:1 ('eli 'eli lamah `azabhtani). A statement uttered by Jesus on the cross just ...
