Jlink.co.uk
Title
London-based Japanese translation, interpreting & localization by Japanese Link
Description
Japanese people often claim that their language is more ambiguous and less precise than, say, many Western European languages. This is coupled with a complex writing system, described below. Linguists generally agree that Japanese grammar is not especially difficult compared to other languages.
Where English has one alphabet of 26 letters (plus their capital equivalents), Japanese uses 2 phonetic alphabets known as kana (hiragana and katakana) together with numerous characters originally borrowed from Chinese, called kanji.
Japanese people learn around 2000 kanji as part of their compulsory education, which is the number required to read a newspaper properly. In practice, many Japanese adults know several thousand more! There are also 50 characters in each set of kana.
