Japan has a high population concentration in urban areas on the plains since 75% of Japan's land area is made up of mountains, [26] and also Japan has a forest cover rate of 68.5% (the only other developed countries with such a high forest cover percentage are Finland and Sweden). [22]

keiyōshi, or i adjectives, which have a conjugating ending i ( い) (such as 暑い atsui "to be hot") which can become past ( 暑かった atsukatta "it was hot"), or negative ( 暑くない atsuku nai "it is not hot"). nai is also an i adjective, which can become past ( 暑くなかった atsuku nakatta "it was not hot"). Entranceways of Japanese houses called genkan signal where you should take off your shoes with the help of its raised floors. The lower area indicates where you should remove your shoes and the raised upper area, often in a different type of flooring, is considered indoor living space. The current issue of the shrinking workforce in Japan alongside its aging population has resulted in a recent need to attract foreign labour to the country. Reforms which took effect in 2015 relax visa requirements for "Highly Skilled Foreign Professionals" and create a new type of residence status with an unlimited period of stay. There are some language islands in mountain villages or isolated islands such as Hachijō-jima island, whose dialects are descended from the Eastern dialect of Old Japanese. Dialects of the Kansai region are spoken or known by many Japanese, and Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy (see Kansai dialect). Dialects of Tōhoku and North Kantō are associated with typical farmers. a b "平成２３年末現在における外国人登録者統計について 法務省"[Statistics of Registered Foreigners in 2011] (in Japanese). Japan: Ministry of Justice. February 22, 2012. Archived from the original on April 19, 2012 . Retrieved June 20, 2012.Hāfu (a kana rendition of "half") is a term used for people who are biracial and ethnically half Japanese. Of the one million children born in Japan in 2013, 2.2% had one or two non-Japanese parents. [70] According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, one in forty-nine babies born in Japan today are born into families with one non-Japanese parent. [82] Most intermarriages in Japan are between Japanese men and women from other Asian countries, including China, the Philippines and South Korea. [83] Southeast Asia too, also has significant populations of people with half-Japanese ancestry, particularly in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Blair, Gavin (2023-07-26). "Japan's population drops by nearly 800,000 with falls in every prefecture for the first time". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-07-26.

Ikeda-san wa yonjū-ni sai da. "As for Mx Ikeda, they are forty-two years old." Others in the group may also be of that age. Hiragana and katakana were first simplified from kanji, and hiragana, emerging somewhere around the 9th century, [51] was mainly used by women. Hiragana was seen as an informal language, whereas katakana and kanji were considered more formal and was typically used by men and in official settings. However, because of hiragana's accessibility, more and more people began using it. Eventually, by the 10th century, Modern Japanese is considered to begin with the Edo period (which spanned from 1603 to 1867). Since Old Japanese, the de facto standard Japanese had been the Kansai dialect, especially that of Kyoto. However, during the Edo period, Edo (now Tokyo) developed into the largest city in Japan, and the Edo-area dialect became standard Japanese. Since the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages has increased significantly. The period since 1945 has seen many words borrowed from other languages—such as German, Portuguese and English. [10] Many English loan words especially relate to technology—for example, pasokon (short for "personal computer"), intānetto ("internet"), and kamera ("camera"). Due to the large quantity of English loanwords, modern Japanese has developed a distinction between [tɕi] and [ti], and [dʑi] and [di], with the latter in each pair only found in loanwords. [11] Geographic distribution Japanese citizenship is conferred jure sanguinis, and monolingual Japanese-speaking minorities often reside in Japan for generations under permanent residency status without acquiring citizenship in their country of birth, although legally they are allowed to do so. This is because Japanese law does not recognise dual citizenship after the age of adulthood, and so people becoming naturalised Japanese citizens must relinquish their previous citizenship upon reaching the age of 20 years [ citation needed]Richard Smart. "Japan's population declines for first time since 1920s – official census | World news". The Guardian . Retrieved 2017-04-17. Chinese, Russian, Arabic… Westerners often say a language is difficult when it doesn’t look like their own. Japanese is no exception. So is Japanese really that difficult to learn, or is it just misunderstood?

Yeung, Jessie; Karasawa, Moeri (2023-04-13). "Japan's population drops by half a million in 2022". CNN . Retrieved 2022-04-17. The so-called -te verb form is used for a variety of purposes: either progressive or perfect aspect (see above); combining verbs in a temporal sequence ( Asagohan o tabete sugu dekakeru "I'll eat breakfast and leave at once"), simple commands, conditional statements and permissions ( Dekakete-mo ii? "May I go out?"), etc.Words of different origins occupy different registers in Japanese. Like Latin-derived words in English, kango words are typically perceived as somewhat formal or academic compared to equivalent Yamato words. Indeed, it is generally fair to say that an English word derived from Latin/French roots typically corresponds to a Sino-Japanese word in Japanese, whereas an Anglo-Saxon word would best be translated by a Yamato equivalent. The word da (plain), desu (polite) is the copula verb. It corresponds approximately to the English be, but often takes on other roles, including a marker for tense, when the verb is conjugated into its past form datta (plain), deshita (polite). This comes into use because only i-adjectives and verbs can carry tense in Japanese. Two additional common verbs are used to indicate existence ("there is") or, in some contexts, property: aru (negative nai) and iru (negative inai), for inanimate and animate things, respectively. For example, Neko ga iru "There's a cat", Ii kangae-ga nai "[I] haven't got a good idea". nation" (PDF). Worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-05-13 . Retrieved 2017-04-17.

Main article: Japanese phonology Spoken Japanese Vowels The vowels of Standard Japanese on a vowel chart. Adapted from Okada (1999:117). PDF). The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Statistics Bureau . Retrieved 2015-10-14. With about 156,000 learners in the United States, Japanese isn’t nearly as popular a learning language as Spanish or French. But year after year, the language of Mishima — so-called after the Japanese author Yukio Mishima — continues to spread far beyond the Sea of Japan and Mount Fuji. There are also a great number of words of mimetic origin in Japanese, with Japanese having a rich collection of sound symbolism, both onomatopoeia for physical sounds, and more abstract words. A small number of words have come into Japanese from the Ainu language. Tonakai ( reindeer), rakko ( sea otter) and shishamo ( smelt, a type of fish) are well-known examples of words of Ainu origin. Japan demographic woes deepen as birthrate hits record low". Archived from the original on 2023-06-02 . Retrieved 2023-06-02.

Space

Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan Intercensal Adjustment of Current Population Estimates 2010 – 2015 Table of Kana (including Youon): Hiragana top, Katakana in the center and Romanized equivalents at the bottom The number of foreign residents of Japan reached a high of 2.93 million in 2019 before falling to 2.76 million at the end of 2021. [106] The number of foreign workers was 1.46 million in 2018, 29.7% are in the manufacturing sector; 389,000 are from Vietnam and 316,000 are from China. [107]