With this program you start from zero, learning first survival phrases and vocabulary, and eventually progress to a high-intermediate level of speaking and understanding. By Level 5 the pace and conversation move quite rapidly, accelerating exposure to new vocabulary and structures, approaching native speed and comprehension. You'll learn to speak more in-depth about your personal life and emotional state, and be able to create complex sentences using a mix of tenses and moods. The emphasis is on pronunciation and comprehension, and on learning to speak.

By the 5th century AD, Chinese characters began to be widely used in Japan. This early alphabet, Kanji, created new literacy, but brought many complications in pronunciation. In the 8th century, two new phonetic alphabets, or kana, were devised to bridge the gap: Hiragana and Katakana. Hiragana is used along with the Kanji to show the syllables that form suffixes and particles ‐ "sounds" in other words, while Katakana was used for foreign loan words, like "coffee" or "computer." Today in Japan, the three writing systems are combined, with Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana often appearing within a single sentence.

Japanese is spoken by about approximately 122 million people in Japan. There are also speakers in the Ryukyu Islands, Korea, Taiwan, parts of the US, and Brazil. Pimsleur's Japanese teaches a polite level of Japanese appropriate for most situations in Japan. In Level 4, you will also learn some ways of speaking in a less formal manner, used in conversation between friends, family members, or colleagues who are at the same level in an organization.

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