Resources on Japanese Language Schools

Japanese Language Schools

Language School

A language school is where one can learn a foreign language. Speaking a foreign language aids communication and hence global understanding. There are hundreds of foreign languages and dialects to learn.

A language school is generally located either; in the student's home country allowing the student to learn the language without leaving his own country or in an English speaking country where language studies often are combined with activities and cultural studies. See language travel.

There are many language schools listed on the Internet and it may be hard to find the one that best fits your needs. Specialized travel agencies represent several language schools and may be able to give you advice.

When evaluating a language school and their site, look for a professional image, fast response to inquiries, lack of hype and lots of content. While this may not guarantee quality, at least it provides an indicator of what's to come.

Excerpt from "Language school." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 15 Oct 2006, 08:27 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 27 Oct 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Language_school&oldid=81557708

Japanese Language

Japanese ([...],Nihongo [...]) is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary which indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically-distinctive pitch accent system. Its recorded history goes back to the 8th century, when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled.

Japanese is written primarily in Chinese characters (called kanji) and hiragana, supplemented by katakana for certain uses. Hiragana and katakana are a pair of syllabaries originally derived from Chinese characters. The Latin alphabet (called romaji) is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for things such as company names, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer. Western style Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Chinese/Japanese numberings are also commonplace.

The Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loans from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created on Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late 19th century, Japanese has borrowed huge numbers of words from Western languages, primarily English.

Excerpt from 'Japanese language' Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 24 May 2006, 07:37 UTC. 15 May 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language