Spoken Japanese

Distinctive features of "the sound" of Japanese include very simple syllable structure, relatively few vowels (5) and contrasts between long and short vowels. Japanese has more different sounds than say... Hawaiian. But it has less than the Indo-European languages. Many people find this euphonic ("good sounding"). Most Japanese words can be readily pronounced intelligibly ("so that it can be understood") by native English speakers, with only a minute or two of explanation. As such, English has many Japanese loan words (compare this to harder-to-pronounce languages like Russian, Chinese, or Vietnamese).

Providing some details on some of these words you are probably already familiar with can illuminate various aspects of how Japanese sounds:

• sushi 寿司—English speakers will pronounce the 'u' different than Japanese speakers, but it will still be understandable
• tsunami 津波—English speakers often pronounce the 'ts' as just a 's'; this is a harder one
• Tokyo 東京—English speakers won't pronounce the 'o's in this word as "long" (duration)
• samurai 侍—The Japanese 'r' sounds more like the middle flap sound in butter (American English pronunciation) than the 'r's in railroad.
• Zen 禅— ...

Speakers of English will be able recognize many words in spoken Japanese, particularly in settings that require lots of these "loan" words. For instance, in anime アニメ, you get a lot of these sorts of words as Japanese people use foreign borrowings to make stuff that sounds cool to them, similar to how you—dear weeb—probably things automatically sound cooler in Japanese > English.

Grammar

In many ways, Japanese grammar is easier to learn than that of European languages, including English. Japanese has far less "irregular verbs" than English and its conjugation rules are fairly straight forward. Japanese grammar is well-studied and ample resources exist to get more details if you need them.

One area where Japanese Grammar reflects Japanese society is in its use of many different politeness/formality levels. There are discrete levels reflected in verb conjugations and word choice, with no analog in English as I know it. In some European languages, this might be comparable to different forms of "you" (c.f. Spanish tú vs ustéd). Learning to use Japanese in a "proper", native-like way will mean learning enough Japanese culture stuff to know what is appropriate in what circumstances and the corresponding linguistic forms to go with those situations. In English, on the other hand, talking politely with people of all sorts basically follows the same form. You could say "Hello, how are you?" to the CEO of a company or a person younger that you've known for years, and it would be fine.

Japanese, on the other hand, grammatically distinguishes different ways of talking to different sorts of people. Japanese teachers are more likely than not to be quite strict in instructing you on speaking appropriately to others. Learning texts most usually start with the "desu form" of generic polite speaking, giving you sentences like 私は学生です Watashi wa gakusei desu "I am a student". Meeting polite (Japanese) society and using sentences like this with a warm smile and sincere intent, you are certainly to be received well enough. Trying out phrases you learned from anime right from the start may get you thrown into the weeb trashcan.

Many Japanese verb forms may appear long and tedious to pronounce when first seen in writing. For example, 行きま した ikimashita "went" is a whopping 5 written syllable things to say "went". In practice, this isn't so bad because (like every other language) various rules of simplification or "assimilation" apply to make what look like long, complicated words pronounced more "lazily". Clear articulation means pronouncing out all segments clearly, but spoken at normal speed, stuff gets smashed together.

Written Japanese

Written Japanese looks really cool but it is ridiculously complicated. Japanese uses at least four different scripts:

• Kanji (Chinese characters)
• Hiragana (Japanese kana)
• Katakana (Japanese kana)
• Rōmaji (Latin characters)

A typical (21st century) text will contain a blend of all of these. Kanji and hiragana will both nearly always appear in a randomly given sentence and you are likely to see Katakana and Rōmaji whenever foreign stuff (usually English derived) is discussed, including in contexts like business, technology, and the arts.

Kanji 漢字 (Chinese characters) are the worst! They are also everywhere in Japanese texts I have an entire article dedicated to talking about how they work (and suck!). Though that article is mostly in the context of Chinese, pretty much everything discussed there applies to Japanese kanji. Learning kanji is tedious and will likely make you (more) myopic. There is a price to pay obtain higher levels of weeb-dom. Note that in Japanese, Kanji typically have at least two different pronunciations: the so-called on-yomi 音読 み (corresponding to older Chinese pronunciations of characters) and kun-yomi 訓読み (corresponding to Japanese meaning-based readings of characters). Thus the character 国 "nation" is pronounced kuni (a kun-yomi) as a stand-alone native Japanese word, but in compounds is pronounced like koku or goku as in 米国 beikoku "America", 中国 chuugoku "China", and 国民 kokumin "people" (of a nation). Deciding whether to use on-yomi or kun-yomi becomes easier with practice but this doesn't change the fact that learning to read kanji is a big pain that can only be accomplished through hundreds (thousands?) of hours of repeated exposure.

Japanese kana 仮名 include the hiragana 平仮名 and katakana 片仮名 syllabaries (if anyone suggests that these are acckkkkktually something called "mora", tell them to define terms and walk away while they gesticulate and wallow in abstractions). Hiragana look like little squiggles (e.g. vowels of Japanese: あいう えお a, i, u, e, o) and are used mainly to write many grammatical elements of Japanese—endings of verbs, conjunctions linking phrases, and the like. They are also used to write many word, especially ones of Japanese origin. You will see them everywhere. Katakana looks similar to Hiragana but much blockier (c.f. vowels アイウエオ a, i, u, e, o). They are mainly used to write foreign loan words, newly coined terms (e.g. product names), and some scientific stuff such as the species of organisms.

In Japanese-language materials targed at learners—such as materials for school children or relatively advanced learners— content is often sorted by a fixed ordering of kana. When learning Japanese, you will likely be exposed to this ordering, which is based off syllable rather than initial "letter/sound". So the ordering beings: a, i, u, e, o; ka, ki, ku, ke, ko.... Kana are also used to annotate Kanji in learning materials. You definitely should learn kana if you intend to study Japanese seriously as they will allow you to effectively use Japanese pop-up dictionaries to decipher Kanji (more on that later).

Latin characters are also learned by pretty much all Japanese people. For typing Japanese on the computer, typically people type in Latin characters (the "English Alphabet") and candidates of Japanese words magically appear from a pop-up list. Then, the correct things are chosen (see Xah Lee's "Japan Input Method" (2019) for more details). Various systems exist for the Romanization of Japanese—writing Japanese in the Latin ("English") alphabet. You are most likely to encounter Hepburn romanization.

Beyond being used as a tool for working with Japanese, Latin characters are commonly seen in foreign things, product names, and artistic creations.