Japanese Language Notes:

1) Japanese is a language spoken by over 130 million [4] people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant
communities.
2) It is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the nature of Japanese society, with
verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and
persons mentioned in conversation.
3) The language has a relatively small sound inventory, and a lexically significant pitch-accent system.
Japanese is a Mora-timed language.

Writing:
4) The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts: Chinese characters called kanji
(漢字), and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮
名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名). The Latin alphabet, rōmaji (ローマ字), is also often
used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when entering
Japanese text into a computer. Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino-
Japanese numerals are also commonplace.

http://kimallen.sheepdogdesign.net/Japanese/nouns.html
5) With Japanese nouns, there is no complication of gender (like der/die/das in German) or even of plural
forms.

6) Indo-European languages make generous use of pronouns. Japanese does not.

In fact, it is not much of an understatement to say that a large fraction of Westerners' confusion about
Japanese arises from the fact that Japanese uses very few pronouns. Much of the weirdness of Japanese
grammar is, when traced to its origin, a result of the choice not to use pronouns. (Not all, but quite a lot.
Other factors include the differing emphasis of verbs: English verbs express subtleties of temporal
relations, and Japanese verbs are more focused on emotion).

7) You see, instead of substituting pronouns for nouns, Japanese mostly eliminates words from the
sentence to avoid repeating them.

This seems vague and confusing at first, until you learn enough Japanese to realize that other words in
the sentence (usually the particles and the verb) have fine shades of meaning that make the sentence
perfectly clear despite having many words eliminated. This also links in with some unusual ways of
expressing verbs, which conveniently allow subjects not to be named. I'll touch on this again briefly below,
but will defer most of it to the chapters on Verbs.

8) In English, we are taught that every complete sentence must have a subject, which is a noun or a
pronoun, and a predicate, which at least has a verb in it. This is also true in Japanese, but in many cases
it's OK not to state the subject, or even the direct and indirect objects.

9) There are pronouns, by the way. They are even used when it is necessary. Here are some:

watashi (I/me)
anata (you)
kare (he/him)
kanojo (she/her)
watashi-tachi (we/us)
karera (they/them)

10) You learned about subjects/predicates, gerunds, participles, and dependent clauses. Japanese has
some of these grammatical structures, but not all. And it has some that do not exist in English
11) One thing you may have heard about "Asian languages" is that tonality of speech is crucially
important.

12) Like most Asian languages (and unlike most Western languages), Japanese does not use emphasis
(stress) to mark accent. This gives the language its distinctive, rather "flat" sound-- even long words do
not have a stressed syllable. However, Japanese does use pitch-- high and low-- to distinguish words.