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Throughout Japan's history, the origins of the national language have been nothing but hectic. Believed to have come from the Ural-Altaic family-- which houses languages like Russian, Mongolian and Tungusic-- the Japanese languages have formed somewhat of a unique family of its own. Through complicated history and borrowing of systems from other languages, Japanese has become known as one of the most complicated languages in the world. But how does this language work?

To begin an analytical review of the language, we must first acknowledge the history behind the language. It's clear that the writing system is derived from the Chinese syllabary with some major changes. When looking at the Hanzi of Chinese, which are called logograms (a character which represents a word/phrase), you can notice a distinct similarity brought to Kanji. In Japanese, there are three separate writing systems, the most known being kanji, which are the ideographs directly borrowed from Chinese. Each Kanji is a singular character that represents a specific meaning. For example, words like sun, moon, fire and water are each expressed with writing a single Kanji. Due to every unrelated idea requiring a separate character, thousands of ideographs are needed for an objectively good writing system. The other two systems, known as kana, are simpler due to the fact they're both syllabic aiding in the phonotactic structure of the spoken language. But beyond the writing system, especially the speech, a lot of aspects are nothing short of a mystery.

One of the major difficulties in tracing the background of Japanese is the vowel system, which comprises of open syllables. Within the language, there are five vowel phonemes: /a/, /i/. /u/, /e/, /o/. And when someone sees this, most of the time they'd think it's the same as English, which is a complete misunderstanding. English has lengthened vowels and several diphthongs (a phoneme which combines two vowels creating a new sound) with a few triphthongs (a phoneme which combines three vowels creating a new sound). Japanese consists of syllables which are evenly-stressed, each of which always ends with a vowel, but they almost always start with a consonant. This creates words like "u-tsu-ku shi-i" which just means beautiful.

The beauty of this modern formation of Japanese, it has managed to stay intact since the early 8th century. Unlike English, with its three variations over the past two millennia, Japanese speakers are able to easily understand works like Man'yoshu (written after 759) and Tosa nikki (written c. 935). Although there are clear differences between old Japanese and modern Japanese, there's a basic system between the two allowing easy understanding with little complications.

When tapping into the grammatical understanding, it's important to acknowledge the structure of English for easy comparison. English is called an SVO language. All this means is the Subject comes before a Verb and an Object follows the Verb (SVO = Subject, Verb, Object). Linguists call this the syntax of a language. Japanese, on the other hand, is called an SOV language (Subject, Object, Verb). Let's have a little Grammar 101 here. The English sentence, "I kick the ball," is quite simple. "I" is the subject, "kick" is the verb and "the ball" is the object. Well, when you do an informal translation to Japanese, the sentence morphs into "I the ball kick". This is a big step in difficulties of translation due to a confusing outlook when diving straight into the language. Alongside this, Japanese also places modifiers before the modified. English has some similarities in this department with adjectives coming before nouns but not when verbs come before adverbs. Japanese has both modifying words come before their modified word. Instead of "Kick quickly," Japanese writes it as "Quickly kicks." You may be thinking this is how English works, but people writing the adverb before a verb is actually considered grammatically incorrect and informal. Even though it's awkward, don't mess up your adverbs.

Honestly, I could go on and on about the grammar, but I'm only here to give a "small" snippet of the language chosen. Please make requests, offer feedback or just let me know if you have any more questions behind the Japanese language.