Essay On Japanese Language

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Compare to many other languages, including English, German, French, Spanish and some Indo-European languages, as well as Korean, Chinese and Chinese dialects of various areas, Japanese is considered as a language system that has few possible syllables. Within the Japanese phonetic inventory, there are 14 initial consonants: か(k)、が(g)、さ(s)、ざ(z)、た(t)、だ(d)、は(h)、ば(b)、ぱ(p)、ま(m)、な(n)、ら(r)、わ(w)、や(j) and two final consonants: ん(N) , the tenuisっ. Other than these, there are also five vowels which are frequently used: あ(a)い(i)う(u)え(e)お(o). The standard Japanese syllable structure is (C)(j)V(C), which means there is at most one consonant and one semivowel before the vowel, moreover, there is maximum of one consonant after the vowel, and it has to be…show more content…
How about Japanese infants? Researchers have conducted experiments on Japanese babies to test whether they can tell the difference between /u/ and /w/. In Korean, these are clearly different sounds, but in Japanese, there is no separation between these two vowels. The babies’ reactions show that they can differentiate the delicate differences between the two sounds. It seems that regardless of the various sounds that make up the worlds’ many languages, young babies have the ability to hear the differences in sounds. How do babies exercise this special ability? In fact, human beings have a network of 100 billion nerve cells within the brain. Synapses connect nerve cells at each juncture. These are basically the transfer points of received…show more content…
Gray matter contains both cell bodies and the synapses that connect each cell to others, and this decline in gray matter volume in the prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning. Blakemore (2012) illustrated that before puberty, human brains have various neural connections depending on the person’s exposure to various simulations, and the gray matter volume reaches a pre-adolescent peak, puberty is then the period of eliminating any unnecessary connections. If we imagine that the human brain is a tree, this process during human adolescence resembles pruning away the weaker branches so that important branches that remain can grow

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