Languages

Japanese

Three scripts, layered politeness, and an island nation.

Japanese is spoken across an archipelago whose culture reaches from ancient court poetry to modern electronics and animation. Learning it means taking on three writing systems — hiragana, katakana, and kanji — a grammar that marks politeness in detail, and a vocabulary shaped by long contact with Chinese and English, in return for access to one of the largest economies on earth and a culture watched and read on every continent.