If you’re wondering about the general rules on using rendaku—well, it’s actually easier to list the instances where rendaku does not occur. Even then, there are exceptions, and the only way to master these is by constant immersion in the language. 14. Despite popular belief, Japanese has no genetic relation to Chinese

Crystal, David (1988). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 286–287. ISBN 978-0-521-26438-9. What that means is, while you can say a lot of stuff in Japanese, you also don’t give a lot of information. This isn’t too surprising when you think about it—it takes almost all eight syllables just to say “not.”Japanese words and words derived from Japanese in other languages at Wiktionary, Wikipedia's sibling project

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In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese roots and morphology to translate European concepts; [ citation needed] these are known as wasei kango (Japanese-made Chinese words). Many of these were then imported into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [ citation needed] For example, seiji ( 政治, "politics"), and kagaku ( 化学, "chemistry") are words derived from Chinese roots that were first created and used by the Japanese, and only later borrowed into Chinese and other East Asian languages. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way many Greek- and Latin-derived words – both inherited or borrowed into European languages, or modern coinages from Greek or Latin roots – are shared among modern European languages – see classical compound. [ citation needed] Interestingly enough, Japan has a spoken syllable rate of nearly eight syllables per second. That beats out Spanish, French and Italian. 6. But it also has the lowest amount of information density per second This seems to be changing, however. People outside of Japan are becoming more and more interested in learning the language.

Even if you’re not likely to meet a Japanese person who cannot hear or hear very well, this is still a good thing to know! Bonus fact: English is the only foreign language taught in Japanese middle schoolsJapanese language, a language isolate (i.e., a language unrelated to any other language) and one of the world’s major languages, with more than 127 million speakers in the early 21st century. It is primarily spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago; there are also some 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living abroad, mainly in North and South America, who have varying degrees of proficiency in Japanese. Since the mid-20th century, no nation other than Japan has used Japanese as a first or a second language. General considerations Hypotheses of genetic affiliation This likely explains why characters with kunyomi or native Japanese readings are often differentiated by trailing hiragana characters or 送り仮名