You remember that at the end of the first season, I gave you a whole series of vocabulary courses, including a course on the names of capitals. And I did not give you the name of Tokyo since I had planned to do a vocabulary course on the main cities of Japan. And here we are, below you have the list of the 20 biggest cities in Japan.
You will find kanji that you already know, others that are totally new... besides, you already know how the name of Tokyo is written in Japanese since we saw it in a course about kanji, in the first season.
Let’s start as usual.
東京 .
トウキョウ
. Tokyo
川崎 .
かわさき
. Kawasaki
横浜 .
よこはま
. Yokohama
大阪 .
オウサカ
. Osaka
京都 .
キョウト
. Kyoto
神戸 .
コウベ
. Kobe
名古屋 .
なごや
. Nagoya
福岡 .
ふくおか
. Fukuoka
北九州 .
キタキュウシュウ
. Kitakyūshū
札幌 .
サッポロ
. Sapporo
広島 .
ひろしま
. Hiroshima
仙台 .
センダイ
. Sendai
静岡 .
しずおか
. Shizuoka
埼玉 .
さいたま
. Saitama
新潟 .
にいがた
. Niigata
那覇 .
なは
. Naha
奈良 .
なら
. Nara
金沢 .
かなざわ
. Kanazawa
石川 .
いしかわ
. Ishikawa
千葉 .
ちば
. Chiba
Do you remember the last part of the course about the particle の ? We saw that Japanese possession could be, in certain cases, implied and the particle の is no more present in the sentence. What we’re going to see here is pretty much similar. With a little novelty : the suffixes. We won’t see the Japanese suffixes in detail until near the end of this second season. But for now, I’m just giving you a quick glimpse.
For the names of cities, prefectures and islands, there is in Japanese a suffix to say, for example "The city of...", then another suffix to say "The prefecture of... / The department of... ", and finally a last suffix to say" The island of... ". I give you the three below :
市 .
シ
. the city (suffix for city names)
県 .
ケン
. the prefecture, the department (suffix for the prefectures names)
島 .
しま, トウ
. the island (suffix for island names)
To give you a little idea, I’m going to take a city name as an example and add the suffix 市 . し to it.
川崎 + 市 = 川崎市 . かわさきし . Kawazaki-shi → la ciutat de Kawasaki.
By the way, in rômaji, we would write for example Kawasaki-shi with the suffix "shi" separated by a hyphen.
For those of you who may have noticed, there are city names with Sino-Japanese pronunciation and city names with purely Japanese pronunciation. I think you have understood now. Names of cities like "Tokyo" are rather recent, Tokyo is also the name of the old capital of Japan which was then called Edo and which was renamed Tokyo towards the middle of the XIXth century.
Obviously, Japan, like any country, has dozens of cities but if you can at least remember these twenty, that’s already great.
For the more curious of you who will bother to take a look at the title of the lesson, I have used the superlative. I’ll tell you right now, we’re not going to study the superlative until season three or four so don’t worry about that for now.
As usual, reread the lesson, practice writing and speaking, learn to draw all those kanji, practice drawing your katakana and hiragana, and from time to time, review the previous lessons. Also, it would be a good idea for you to get yourself a map of Japan to practice memorizing the location of all these cities. I think it would be a good exercise.
Have a nice day, everyone, and do your homework properly.
Introduction