What are the 4 languages of Japanese? Do you have to learn them all to learn Japanese? necessary?

Question

I dont get it..are they all different? Which is more important & common to learn? Are they all necessary to learn? Which one is the hardest?

Answer 1

I assume you're asking what the 4 writing systems of Japanese are.
They are hiragana, katakana, kanji and romaji.

hiragana/katakana : phonetic symbols
kanji : ideographic symbols
romaji : alphabet based letters

romaji is easy for Americans. But Japanese use hiragana, katakana and kanji exclusively. If you want to read Japanese, you have to learn them.

hiragana and katakana are not so hard to learn. They have only 50 characters respectively. The total of them is 100. But kanji itself is complicated and you have to memorize at least 2000. It's a tough work.

If speaking and hearing only, learning only romaji is just enough.

Answer 2

1. Japanese doesn't have four languages. It has *one*. The rest are dialects, but everyone is taught in school to speak the common Tokyo dialect (standard Japanese).

2. It does, however, have three writing systems and those are all equally important and necessary to learn. The hardest being, naturally, kanji.

Answer 3

Official language Japanese.

The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of glyphs: Chinese characters, kanji, and two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana. The Latin alphabet, rōmaji, is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer.

Japanese is the de facto official language of Japan, which is the only country to have Japanese as an official working language. There are two forms of the language considered standard: hyōjungo (標準語, hyōjungo?) or standard Japanese, and kyōtsūgo (共通語, kyōtsūgo?) or the common language spoken by the people in casual situations (ie, colloquial). As government policy has modernized Japanese, many of the distinctions between the two have blurred. Hyōjungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications, and is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.

Standard Japanese can also be divided into bungo (文語, bungo?) or "literary language," and kōgo (口語, kōgo?) or "oral language", which have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until the late 1940s, and still has relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in bungo, although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). Kōgo is the predominant method of speaking and writing Japanese today, although bungo grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect.

Answer 4

osakan dialect is one but they are really just diffrernt variations of the orignal language. you know like vencaular english and slang.
but as long as you know all the hiragana sounds you can pretty much speak the language.

Answer 5

pretty much just the writing is different. as long as you know hirigana your good.