NECESSITY FOR MEMORISING. 5
The student should endeavour to place himself from the outset at the Japanese point of view. This he can do only by dint of much learning by heart. The trouble thus taken will be of infinite advantage to him, even if his ultimate aim be the indoctrination of the Japanese with foreign ideas. It will put him in sympathy with his hearers. It is true that, of late, English idioms have begun to penetrate into the Japanese language. But it is chiefly into the language of literature. The style of every-day speech is as yet hardly affected by this new influence.
If 3. It is still doubtful in what family of languages Japanese should be included. There is no relationship between it and Aino, the speech of the hairy aborigines whom the Japanese conquerors have gradually pushed eastwards and northwards. In structure, though not to any ap- preciable extent in vocabulary, Japanese closely resembles Korean ; and both it and Korean may possibly be related to Mongol and to Manchu, and therefore claim to be included in the Altaic group. Be this as it may, Japan- ese is what is generally termed an agglutinative language, that is to say that it builds up its words and grammatical forms by suffixes loosely soldered to the root or stem. It also shows faint traces of the " law of vowel harmony " or" attraction," which characterises the Altaic languages. This manifests itself in a tendency to uniformity in the vowels of successive syllables ; as ototoshi, " the year before last," for ato toshi. Similarly in several of the words recently adopted from English, such as inki " European ink ;" Gotto, " the Christian God ;" bukku, 11 a European book."
1i 4. The earliest Japanese literature that has come down
