This textbook grew as a response to a specific need. Although a number of introductions to Japanese were and are readily available, none of them happened to fit the particular situation we found ourselves in, which demanded that students be able to tackle a short story written in Japanese within six months of starting the language, and that they should be in a position to at least attempt newspaper articles within a year. It was found that the commonest approach to language teaching today, which rightly stresses oral skills and communicative competence based on situational drills in a social context, demanded far more time than was available and, for good reasons, tended to ignore the written form of the language, especially in the early stages. So it was that we were forced to create something very different. Although the results will not be to everyone's taste, it is hoped that many students of the language will find it useful. What we can say with certainty is that it has proved to be effective in practice.

Recent years have seen a startling increase in the number of publications designed to introduce the language to an ever-expanding market. They can be broadly divided into those that operate exclusively in romanised Japanese, and those that do not. Foremost among the first group is undoubtedly Eleanor H. Jorden's new book Japanese: The Spoken Language (Yale University Press, 1987-). The care and scholarship that has gone into its preparation is such that it fully deserves to outsell her earlier textbook, Beginning Japanese (Yale University Press, 1962-3), which itself went through no less than thirty reprints. It is a model of its kind; but Jorden's premise has always been that the written and spoken forms of the language must be quarantined off from each other, and that a good knowledge of the spoken is an absolute prerequisite before the rigours of the written form can be attempted. It is perhaps a measure of the difficulty of the writing system that such a step should be thought necessary, for no serious teacher of Sanskrit or Arabic would ever consider it desirable, if it were indeed considered possible. By and large, students who learn with this method certainly have good oral skills, but it takes a long time before they really come to grips with the written form.

THE LANGUAGE

Genetic affiliation

It might seem to the casual observer that Japanese is closely related to Chinese, but nothing could be further from the truth. Admittedly Japanese ‘looks’ similar to Chinese and has absorbed a large number of Chinese words over the centuries, but these loanwords are merely a sign of cultural contact, not of genetic affiliation. Indeed, it would be difficult to think of two languages more dissimilar: Chinese being originally monosyllabic (now largely disyllabic), tonal, and isolating, with a subject-verb-object (SVO) order; Japanese being polysyllabic, atonal, and agglutinative, with a subject-object-verb (SOV) order. It was precisely this vast gulf between the two languages that caused so many problems when the Japanese tried to adapt the Chinese script to their own ends in the eighth and ninth centuries.

The whole question of where the language comes from is a highly charged subject in Japan, for the idea that Japanese is in some way unique, sui generis and without parallel, is a potent and indeed comfortable myth in times of self-doubt. A great many books and articles dealing with the origins and peculiarities of the language are produced for the general reading public, and they sell extremely well. The roots of the language are indeed uncertain. Some scholars, perhaps the majority, argue that it is related to Korean and to the Altaic group of languages that is found throughout central Asia as far west as Turkey. Similarities in the way verbs are formed point to a common origin. Certainly if one were to restrict oneself to syntax alone, Japanese and Korean are so similar as to appear obvious sister languages. The problem lies with the vocabulary, where it has proved extremely difficult to identify words with a common root that could not at the same time simply be loanwords from Korean into Japanese.

The relative scarcity of sets of words that are clearly connected with each other is something that plagues Altaic linguistics in general and renders the kind of safe comparative work common within the Indo-European group highly problematic.