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Japanese Greetings Basic Japanese Greetings, Japanese Greetings and Expressions. On this page you will find all of the basic Japanese Greetings that you need to know when you learning Japanese. Of course just reading the words won't actually help you to speak and pronounce the language correctly, so we've also included audio so that you can also hear the words. Scroll down and click on 'Play' and the back and forward arrows to select the word you would like to hear. Now let's study some of the greetings you'll use right from the start.

The words in brackets are literal translation. The suffix -san is used in Japanese as a term of respect meaning "Mr. " Japanese counter word. In Japanese, as in Chinese and Korean, numerals cannot quantify nouns by themselves (except, in certain cases, for the numbers from one to ten; see below). For example, to express the idea "two dogs" in Japanese one must say 二匹の犬 ni hiki no inu (literally "dog of small-animal-count-two").

Here 犬 inu means "dog", 二 ni is the number 2, "の" "no" is a possessive particle, and 匹 hiki is the counter for small animals. These counters are not independent words and always appear with a number (or question word) before them. If the number is unknown, a question word is used, most often 何 nan, as in 何名様 nan-mei-sama "how many guests", or sometimes 幾 iku as in 幾晩 iku-ban "how many nights? ". Counters are similar in function to the word "pieces" in "two pieces of paper" and "cup" in "two cups of coffee". They differ, however, in that they cannot take non-numerical modifiers. Just as in English, different counters can be used to convey different types of quantity. Substitution of counters[edit] Learning Japanese Language Games, Free japanese alphabet symbols. Japanese Childrenbooks - Practice reading Hiragana !

Tim Sensei's Corner.