The Japanese Language

(Full disclosure: if you sign up for a premium account, Langfocus receives a small referral fee. But the free account is great too!)

Special thanks to my lovely and amazing wife for her Japanese audio samples!

My current Patrons include these fantastic people:

Brandon Gonzalez, Eric Garland, Andres Resendez Borgia, ShadowCrossZero, Zhiyuan 'George' Shi, Michael Arbagi, Trevor Lawrence, Pomax, Виктор Павлов, John Moffat, Auguste Fields, Guillermo Jimenez, Bennett Seacrist, Sidney Frattini Jr, Ruben Sanchez, Michael Cuomo, Brian Michalowski, Sebastian Langshaw, Lorraine Inez Lil, Don Sawyer, Scott Russell, Florian Breitwieser, Fiona de Visser, Raymond Thomas, divad, Justin Faist, Jens Aksel Takle, Zhukai LIN, yasmine jaafar, Tryggurhavn, Behnam Esfahbod, JC Edwards, Ashley Dieroff, Steve Decina, Thomas Mitchell, Mahmoud Hashemi, Fatimahl, Kevin Law, David LeCount, Carl saloga, Edward Wilson, Mohammed A Abahussain, Peter Nikitin, Fred, JL Bumgarner, Rob Hoskins, Thomas A. McCloud, Ian Smith, Georgy Petukhov, Nicholas Gentry, iddo berger, Brent Warner, Kevi J. Baron, Maurice Chou, Matthew C, Caio Fernandes, Suzanne Jacobs, Johann Goergen, Leo Barudi, Piotr Chmielowski, Rick Gerritzen, Sailcat, Mark Kemp, Éric Martin, Marco Antonio Barcellos Junior, Simon Blanchet, Sergios Tsakatikas, Bruno Filippi, Jeff Miller, Ulrike Baumann, and Panot.

Music:

Intro: "Rollin Through Osaka" by MK2

Main: "Back in Town" by Silent Partner

00:00 General information about Japanese
00:52 The history and development of Japanese
06:54 Varieties of Japanese today
07:58 Japanese phonology
11:54 Japanese word order
13:14 Topic marker and subject marker
16:05 Agglutination
17:53 Vocabulary & the writing system
22:16 Final comments

[Langfocus]

I'm an active member on several Pod101 sites, and I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I do!

(Full disclosure: if you sign up for a premium account, Langfocus receives a small referral fee. But if I didn't like it, I wouldn't recommend it, and the free account is pretty good on its own!)

[hannahyoung]

lolol I see all these comments saying " I am Japanese, and I speak it fluently; however when I think about it, it's all kind of confusing."
How encouraging :D

[faisalumair]

Dude, its even hard to imagine how much you have to study before you make any video. Respect.

[hinata]

I'm Japanese and I've been learning English and Italian. It is hard for me to learn these language but watching this video makes me feel that both English and Italian are very kind languages. I respect and appreciate those who study Japanese.

[thelastowitch]

"you don't need to know all the 2000+ kanji"
Yes, yes I do.

[thesadbanana]

Can you imagine if the English language functioned the same way as Japanese. You would have to switch between the greek and latin alphabets in the same sentence. Also throw in a couple Nordic runes into the mix because why not.

[AlabamaSoldier]

Russian: "I'm so simple. I always follow the same rules."
English: "I usually just do whatever feels right"
Japanese: "Here's a compass. Use your imagination."

[Bringlese]

That was maybe the best video I've ever seen

[JoseCruz]

I got an Asian studies minor in college with an emphasis in Japanese, 4 total years of 2 classes a semester and man it kicked my butt so hard. I studied for hours a day, spoke all day, wrote all day ( filled up four 300 page notebooks JUST to practice writing), and managed to get a perfect grade in the class every semester... but man it took a lot of work to get all the kanji, stroke orders, vocabulary, grammar, meanings and readings down to memory because they can get incredibly complicated. I grew up knowing Mexican Spanish and learned English later on, but Japanese makes those two languages seem like baby-stuff.

I'm also currently binge watching all your videos. They're so interesting and informative, even when they're about languages I already speak. The Mexican Spanish video was was very cool, and I even learned something as a native speaker!

[bobthebox]

I learned so much more about the japanese language from this 24 minute video compared to the 8 hour long online course

[naoki]

I am a native Japanese speaker.
I was so surprised that what a complex language we speak...

[davidyasui]

Kudos to you and Hiromi for the amount of work you did on this video. It answered a few questions and was very informative! Arigato gozaimasu!

[linski]

Japanese is my third language and now working on Spanish as the fourth language. It is weird how I feel Japanese and Spanish share the same pronounciation in some circumstances.

[zakwasny]

As a Polish native speaker learning Japanese for three months now I think I may be a hidden masochist.

[Langfocus]

Note: Around 14:10 I used the wrong kanji for "okoru". I used 起こる which means "to happen" rather than "怒る" which means "to get angry", but both are pronounced ”okoru". A silly mistake!

[harukahirose]

Ughhhh Thank you so so so so much for making this video!
I'm a Japanese living in Spain. Quite a bit of people around me are curious about Japanese language especially because of manga & anime, for which I'm so grateful and proud of. But the problem is I always have trouble in explaining how Japanese language works actually!

For example:
People ask me like "What does 'Japanese word written in alphabet' mean!? "
Me "Well I can't tell what this exactly means without kanjis which have meanings."
People "?? How could it possible??"

I would recommend this video to anyone who is interested in Japanese. This video explains everything about my language way better than me only in half an hour!! 😂

[Blondesax]

Yeah, I'm sold. Japanese sounds like a great life-long learning project. I'm in.

[stephenscrub]

What I love about Langfocus is that every video of his is so high quality that it can easily be rewatched multiple times. It's clear how much work Paul puts into this channel.

[ClaudiniGod]

I started learning Japanese exactly 6 months ago and it feels as rewarding as Paul says. Knowing most of the stuff in the video encouraged me to keep going. Good job Paul!

[Guardian]

I'm Japanese and was just amazed by the amount of research you did here. Your presentation is superb and I couldn't stop watching it even though I obviously knew the language.
Thank you for making this video.