Page 16 - Basic Japanese

someone eat,’ tabe-sase-rare-ru means ‘will be made to eat,’

tabe-sase-rare-tai means ‘want to be made to eat,’ and tabe-
sase-rare-taku-nai means ‘do not want to be made to eat.’ This

feature of language is called agglutination, and it is one of

the reasons many scholars think Japanese belongs to the
Altaic language family.

Counters

Another feature that exists in Japanese but not in English is
a category of suffixes called counters. Counters are placed

after numerals in order to express the quantity or amount of
people and things, and the choice of counters varies

depending on the shape, size, and type of the item. For
example, go-nin no hito means ‘the five people’; go-hiki no inu

means ‘the five dogs’; go-dai no kuruma means ‘the five cars.’
Nin, hiki, and dai are the counters for these respective types

of items.

Honorifics

The Japanese language has rich and extensive honorific
systems that express respect, humility, and politeness.

These systems govern speech styles through the choices of
suffixes, prefixes, (pro)nouns, verbs, adjectives, and phrases

that are determined based on the relationship among the
speaker, the listener, and a third party with respect to the
social grouping and social hierarchy. For example, a simple

question like ‘Will you go?’ can be Iku no, Ikimasu ka, or

Irasshaimasu ka depending on how close or distant the
speaker feels to the person. English does not have such

verbal suffixes for expressing politeness or respect.