Help:Japanese language and culture

As UTAU and VOCALOID are products of Japan and their main users are from Japan, there are many of us who try to reach out to the Japanese users. But before you do so, you need to know a bit about them, and the Japanese language.

=The Japanese language= The Japanese language is a language isotate spoken mostly in Japan. This language has nothing common with other languages except for Korean, with which shares some grammatical rules. Yet the words and the honorific system are very different between the two languages. So this language is regarded as one of the most difficult languages to master by non-native speakers.

The Chinese language has made a great influence on the Japanese language. Japanese did not have their own alphabets originally and adopted Kanji from China with its culture. This is why many Japanese Kanji symbols and idioms are exactly the same with Chinese.

Dialects
Three main dialects. Eastern Japanese, Western Japanese and Ryūkyūan. In addition, there are many subcategory dialects with their own accents and words. Yet the Tokyo dialect is taught in school and used in mass media nationwide, so most Japanese can speak this standard language and have no difficulty communicating one another. The Japanese language taught in overseas is also the standard language.

=The Japanese alphabet= They are in syllables, and there are ways to write it; it is in Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji and Romaji.

Hiragana
Hiragana was developed from Kanji. It is the basic letter in the Japanese language and is often used to clarify the pronunciation and meaning of Kanji. Hiragana used to be seemed as "the letter for women, not for men", so it often gives the soft and sometimes cute, immature impression.

Katakana
Katakana was also derived from Kanji. Historically it was created for the reading help of Chinese classics, and is commonly used to write adopted words now. It is also used to lay stress on a word or a phrase. Katakana often gives the impression of something special or unusual.

Kanji
Unlike in the original Chinese language (and the Korean language), many Kanji alphabets in the Japanese language have several pronunciation and interpretations respectively. In addition, the combining of Kanji often creates the totally new meaning, which is another difference from the Chinese language. Kanji in the Japanese language gives the hard, strict and formal impression.

Kanji is important in the Japanese language, and in learning the language, several characters of Kanji must be memorized to be able to read and write Japanese fluently.

Romaji
Romaji is Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji written in Latin alphabet letters. There is a system that dictates how Kana is written using Latin alphabet letters. This is called the Hepburn Romanization system. Historically, other romanization methods existed as well, such as Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki.

These days, almost all Japanese words, letters and sentences are romanized using the Hepburn system.

=The Japanese culture=

Internet culture
=The Japanese and the Internet=

Interactions to non-Japanese people
Their attitudes towards non-Japanese people may vary so differently that it is pretty difficult to predict how they see everyone else as a whole. There are Japanese people who are accommodating to foreigners, but there are xenophobic ones as well.

Japanese cyberspeak
wktk - When you see this in videos, someone in them is eagerly awaiting, or excited.

www - If the western users has LOL (laughing out loud), this is their way of saying lol. The longer the w's, the longer the lols. "wwwwwww" equals to "lololololololol".

Their way of saying this can be either funny or insulting. Attached to end of sentences, it is nothing out of the ordinary. However, wwwwww on its own may mean something insulting, depending on the situation.