First the good news. Picking up a few words of Japanese, even managing a sentence or two, is not difficult. Pronunciation is simple and standard and there are few exceptions to the straightforward grammar rules. With a couple of weeks' effort you should be able to read the words spelled out in hiragana and katakana, Japanese phonetic characters, even if you can't understand them. And, any time spent learning Japanese will be amply rewarded by the thrilled response you'll elicit from the locals, who'll always politely comment on your fine linguistic ability.

The bad news is that it takes a very great effort indeed to become halfway proficient in Japanese, let alone master the language. One of the main stumbling blocks is the thousands of kanji characters that need to be memorized, most of which have at least two pronunciations, depending on the sentence and their combination with other characters. Another major difference is the multiple levels of politeness embodied in Japanese, married with different sets of words used by men and women (although this is less of a problem). Finally, as you move around Japan there are different dialects to deal with, such as Osaka-ben, the dialect of the Kansai area, involving whole new vocabularies.

Japanese characters
The exact origins of Japanese are a mystery, and until the sixth century it only existed in the spoken form. Once the Japanese imported Chinese characters, known as kanji, they began to develop their own forms of written language.

Grammar
There are several significant grammar differences between Japanese and European languages. Verbs do not change according to the person or number, so that ikimasu can mean "I go", "he/she/it goes", or "we/they go". Pronouns , such as i and they, are usually omitted, since it's clear from the context...

Common words and phrases in Japanese
See common words and phrases...

Pronunciation
Throughout this guide, Japanese words have been transliterated into the standard Hepburn system of romanization, called romaji . Pronunciation is...