Tag: Japanese

Writing Japanese, English Alphabet

The Japanese language was added a month ago to the supported languages of the Verbix verb conjugator. Currently Verbix allows users to enter the verbs to conjugate in letters of the English alphabet.

This is achieved by supporting romaji, i.e., writing the letters in Latin script. This is also called romanization.

There are several romanization systems, from which Verbix chose Hepburn romanization with minor modifications. Hepburn is the most common romanization system in use today, especially in the English-speaking world.

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CJK languages – Chinese, Japanese, Korean

CJK is the abbreviation of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. These three languages are geographically close. But do they have something else in common?
Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language. Japanese belongs to a Japonic language family. And Korean is a language isolate. Japanese might be related to Korean, but it’s not sure.
Hanzi, kanji, hanja
Chinese Character: hanzi, kanji, hanja

One thing is common, though. They all use chinese characters: hanzi (Chinese) or kanji (Japanese) or hanja (Korean). In Korean chinese characters are used less frequently.

Japanese Verb Conjugation

Japanese verb conjugation is quite simple, because most verbs are regular.

The regular verbs are divided in Ichidan and Godan verbs.

Ichidan verbs end in -eru and -iru. The Godan verbs end in a consonant or vowel and -u.

There are two irregular verbs:

  • suru ‘to do’, and
  • kuru ‘to come’.

Suru is one of the most used verbs in Japanese, because it is used to form compound verbs, such as benkyousuru （勉強する）’to study’ and dansusuru （ダンスする）’to dance’. From the latter example you can see that suru is used to make new verbs from loan words, too.

While the verb conjugation itself is easy, the use of the verbs is not. But that’s another story.

Japanese Verb Conjugator