Five interesting facts about the Japanese language:
Japan refers to itself as 日本 which is pronounced ‘Nihon’ or ‘Nippon’ – but in other languages it is usually called ‘Japan’ or a variation of that.
Japan uses three writing systems which are the native alphabets of hiragana and katakana and the Chinese characters called kanji. Kanji is paired with hiragana to form words and sentences and katakana is used for foreign loanwords as well as adding emphasis.
There are no plurals in Japanese and there are no articles such as ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’.
The Japanese word for ‘Japan’ means ‘Land of the Rising Sun’.
Japanese is one of the fastest spoken languages at 7.84 syllables per second, for comparison, English is spoken at 6.19 syllables per second.
Experts in Japanese translation services
If you would like to work with a professional translation agency for the translation of your documents from Japanese to English or English to Japanese, please do get in touch with the award-winning team at Surrey Translation Bureau.