About Japanese

Spoken by 125 million speakers, Japanese is primarily spoken in Japan. The Japanese language uses 3 different kind of scripts: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji (borrowed from Chinese characters).

Japan is the 3rd largest economy in the world and is a technological superpower. It is the home of some of the most admired and innovative companies in the world such as Toyota, Sony, Nintendo and Uniqlo. It is mostly known for its scientists, engineers, video game developers, manga artists and comedians.

Famous Japanese people include Hayao Miyazaki (Film director), Shigeru Miyamoto (Creator or Mario, Zelda and more), Tadao Ando (Architect Pritzker Price 1995), Kengo Kuma (Architect) and Downtown which includes Hamada and Matsumoto (Comedians).

The entries in the four sections of Frazebook for Japanese give, as with the other languages, some basic greetings in Japanese, taking things further, buying some simple food and numbers. Japanese is perhaps the most polite language in the world. However just being polite not being enough for the Japanese, they have honorific speech called 'Keigo' to show respect in social situations. While not yet covered on this website, this honorific speech is further divided up into 3 other respectful, humble and polite speech - as a general rule of the thumb, the longer the sentence the more respectful the speech is (more to follow).

The phrases given in Frazebook are just a start of course. We hope that you will enjoy learning them if you plan to visit Japan and that it may be the start of learning the language in more depth as time goes by.