Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. During the Heian period (7941185), Chinese had considerable influence on the vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (11851600) included changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language, and the first appearance of European loanwords. The standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo  (modern Tokyo) region in the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th centurymid-19th century). Following the end in 1853 of Japan's self-imposed isolation, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly. English loanwords, in particular, have become frequent, and Japanese words from English roots have proliferated.

Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure  vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subjectobjectverb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topiccomment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese equivalents of adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.

Japanese has no genetic relationship with Chinese,[3] but it makes extensive use of Chinese characters, or kanji (), in its writing system, and a large portion of its vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system  primarily uses two syllabic (or moraic) scripts, hiragana ( or ) and katakana  ( or ). Latin script is used in a limited fashion, such as for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals.

Basics Is important for learning Japanese.

Thanks,
Azim

Hi,

In my views learning Japanese for an Indian is easier then any other language speaker of the world. I can say so on the basis of :-

1. As Indians we have a tendency to put pressure on our tongue and we try to se clearly without distorting the word. The same trait I found while learning Japanese on my own.
2. In primary schools Indian students are taught various Hindi sound phonetics like Ka ki sa si su etc. The same sounds are used in Japanese language and ultimately these sounds consist their words. The Hindi sound phonetics are more in number and can accommodate large variety of words than the Japanese.
3. Though the composition of grammar of Hindi and Japanese is not same yet they bear a little resemblance while learning.