Japanese (日本語 nihongo) is spoken in Japan, and essentially nowhere else other than South Korea and China, where some use it as a second language. The language is strongly influenced by Chinese though the two are unrelated; Japanese may be distantly related to Korean, although the written form uses a combination of Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji characters which were all derived from Chinese characters.
Pronunciation guide
Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese or Thai, and is comparatively easy to pronounce. The vowels are pronounced virtually identical to the "Italian way" and there are very few consonants that do not exist in English. All syllables are to be pronounced equal in length. Long vowels take the length of two syllables. Combinations like kya are treated like one syllable and are the only occurrence of sliding vowels, all other syllables are to be pronounced rather separately.