There are currently 122 million people with Japanese as their first language, and it is spoken in 25 countries around the world. It accounts for 6% of all internet traffic.

Someone once wrote that the Japanese language was the "greatest barrier to human communication ever devised", but that shouldn’t put off keen language learners from having a go. The biggest challenge is the writing system. Japanese uses hundreds of symbols, most based on Chinese characters. Japanese – like most languages – also has a lot of words that look the same to an English speaker but mean very different things. An example of this is the symbol pronounced shin, which can translate as God, advance, believe, new, true, stretch, heart and parent!

But there are easy things too. Nouns have no gender, verbs don’t need to be conjugated, there are no articles (a and the) and word order in a sentence (apart from the final verb) is irrelevant.

One important thing a Japanese language learner will have to bear in mind is politeness. For example, many Japanese begin written letters with hankei, which literally means "your enlightened worship". There are no real swear words in Japanese, with some of the strongest insults being kuso (smelly) or baka (fool).