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The first culture was the Jomon culture; they started using polished stones for hunting and pottery for storage and cooking. Most people believe that the oldest pottery comes from Japan.
Japanese language is formed by characters, which are known as kanji. These characters began as pictures but changed with time. There are around 2,000 kanji characters in use.
During elementary school, children learn around 1,000 characters, and they learn the other 1,000 in middle school. Can you imagine? Do you remember how many letters there are in our alphabet?
0 zero 1 ichi 2 ni
3 san 4 shi
5 go
6 rok
7 nana 8 achi 9 kyuu 10 juu
11 juu ichi 12 juu ni 13 juu san
14 juu shi 20 ni-juu
21 ni-juu-ichi 30 san-juu 40 shi-juu
100 hyaku
1.000 sen
10.000 man
1.000.000 hyaku man 100.000.000 oku 1.000.000.000.000 choo
NUMBERS IN JAPANESE
They also have different phonetic scripts: hiragana and katakana.
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