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Why Study Japanese?

Japanese is spoken by the more than 125 million inhabitants of Japan but also by substantial numbers of overseas Japanese.  Although very different from Chinese, Japanese borrowed from the Chinese script and developed a complex orthography of its own that includes a limited number of individual Chinese characters and a syllabary written with two separate sets of about fifty symbols. One of those sets is now basically reserved for spelling of foreign words, an arrangement that has facilitated the absorption and transformation of foreign vocabulary by Japanese speakers. Japanese literature has a long and rich tradition. The first novel in the world, The Tale of Genji, was written in Japan. More recently, Japanese authors have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Japanese films enjoy international renown, and Anime has won huge numbers of fans around the world.