Talking About the Date and Time in Japanese

Talking About the Date and Time in Japanese How Do You Tell the Time in Japanese? Chapters The History of the Japanese Calendar Telling the Time in Japanese Days of the Week in Japanese The 12 Months of the Year in Japanese One Last Thing About Years A Few Examples of Dates in JapaneseAccording to the Japan Foundation, there are thousands of students who choose to study Japanese every year. The majority learn Nihongo, the type of Japanese studied by any foreigner who wants to learn the language.It's quickly becoming one of the most popular languages to study, too. This is because the archipelago is home to anime, manga, Buddhism, the samurai, and much more, all of which are some of the biggest global Japanese cultural and religious exports.Have you decided to take the plunge and start experiencing the richness of the Japanese language, too?There are some facts about Japanese  that you should be aware of before you start learning about the Japanese writing systems and learn kanji and kana (hiragana and katakana). You should probably learn some basic Japanese phrase s, too, such as telling the time and talking about, times, days, dates, and months.Before travelling overseas to Kyoto, Yokohama, Tokyo, Mount Fuji, Osaka, Hokkaido, Kyushu, or Kansai, it’d be useful to do a little study session on dates and time vocabulary so that you can buy tickets for a bus or train or just get a table at a restaurant or reserve a hotel.Fortunately for you, Superprof is here to help you on this journey with an article on how to tell the time in Japanese, how to say days and dates, and how to improve your Japanese vocabulary so that you can talk about the months.EnglishRomajiHiraganaKanjiJanuaryichigatsu??????Februarynigatsu?????Marchsangatsu??????Aprilshigatsu?????Maygogatsu?????Junerokugatsu??????Julyshichigatsu??????Augusthachigatsu??????Septemberkugatsu?????Octoberjugatsu???????Novemberjuichigatsu??????????Decemberjunigatsu?????? ???Note that April can also be called “yongatsu”, July “nanagatsu”, and September “kyugatsu”. February can also be wr itten as: ??.It’s interesting to note that the months in Japanese also have a translation dating back to the calendar used before 1873. Nevertheless, these are not currently used and are only found in poetic texts. It should be noted that they’re largely literal translations, too.  For example, January (known traditionally as ??) would be translated as the “month of friendship”.In Japanese grammar, there are several suffixes used when counting which are somewhat different to the way we count in English. Thus, you can’t use the same suffix when counting people as when counting cylindrical objects or pills. Fortunately, this rule doesn’t apply to counting the months. You can use “getsu” for counting months. Like this:One month = ikkagetsuTwo months = nikagetsuThree months = sankagetsuFour months = yonkagetsuFive months = gokagetsuSix months = rokkagetsuSeven months = nanakagetsuEight months = nikagetsuNine months = kyuukagetsuTen months = jukkagetsuEleven months = juui chikagetsuTwelve months = juunikagetsu One Last Thing About YearsWhen we talk about a year, we use the kanji ?.As we saw earlier, the Japanese use the Gregorian calendar. However, there’s one thing you should note about how they use it: they use dates according to the current emperor. This means that we’re currently in the 29th year of Heisei ?? which started on January 7, 1989 when the reign of Akihito ended. Each emperor gets their own era.Thus, according to the Japanese calender, it’s ??29?, which means the Heisei 29.With such beautiful places to visit, learning Japanese is a great idea. (Source: pixabay.com)“Gengou Free” is a mobile app you can use to convert Japanese dates to Gregorian dates. This can be really useful if you find yourself talking to Japanese natives who express the date in this way. A Few Examples of Dates in Japanese12 April 2001: 2001?4?12?17 March 2007: 2007?3?17?28 August 2004: 2014?8?28?7:30am: ????? ?? which is pronounced “gozen shichi-ji han desu”. If you want to say 7:30pm, you’ll need to change “gozen” ?? for “gogo” ??. Unlike in English, you put the “am” or “pm” part before the time, not after it. This means you start the sentence with either “gogo” or “gozen”.When it comes to dates, you can always replace the Arabic numerals with the Japanese equivalents if you want.When giving the date, you can add ??? or “ kyô wa” (today) and ending the sentence with ??which functions like the verb “to be”.For example, saying “Today is July 8th 2017”, you’d say “???2017?7?8???”.Don’t forget that there’s plenty of etiquette to follow in Japan, too.In short:Studying to say the time, date (day, month, and year) is one of the first things you should learn when you start learning to speak Japanese (or any language for that matter). If you want to live or travel in Japan, these are some of the most important things to learn.The grammar and the pronunciation are overly problematic in Jap anese. The Japanese writing system, however, does complicate matters. However, you don’t need to panic! You won’t need to learn lots of kanji, nor have more than a conversational level in order to tell the time or give the date. You can always start with Arabic numerals and learning just 3 or 4 different kanji symbols. Anybody can manage that!Learning languages always starts with little steps such as learning the date, introducing yourself, and starting conversations. You’ll move onto more complicated and interesting matters later on. Don't forget, you can find a Japanese teacher nearby by searching the Superprof website, and there are always Japanese lessons online to be found in towns and cities across the world.