Tag: Japanese language

The Japanese, of course, spend a lot of energy learning English, with most taking six years of the language, or ...

Recently I wrote about a class of four-character compound words that are fun for students of Japanese to learn because ...

It's always fun to see what natural coincidences occur between languages. A Swedish friend of mine who's married to an ...

One of the most useful words of Japanese is sumimasen, which generally corresponds to "excuse me," though like most aspects ...

The Japanese language has a lot of unique features, like its syllable-based pronunciation system in which ka, ki, ku, ke ...

Life is a little more fun when you know some Japanese, whether it's to communicate with nihonjin who can't use ...

Last time I wrote about the word gohan, which is Japanese for steamed rice that's ready to eat. (Uncooked rice ...

With a sentence structure and grammar unlike anything used in the West along with three different writing systems, learning the ...

Last time I wrote about an interesting feature of the Japanese language, a class of four-character kanji phrases that are ...

The Japanese language naturally has elements that are very different from Western languages, like a formalized system of polite speech ...

The Japanese use English in many ways in their daily lives, for expressing words related to automobiles or technology, for ...

If you've read a few novels by James Clavell, you might come away with the impression that Japanese are highly ...

I often think the themes in anime and games must be potentially confusing to some viewers, even when everything is ...

You probably don't think of Japanese foods like omurice (an omelet served over rice with a ketchup heart drawn on ...

Dialects are part of the wonderfully complex world of human language, and Japanese has many distinct dialects in use, although ...

One interesting aspect of the Japanese language is its "vertical" nature, with different words used in different situations depend on ...

There's no way around it: alcohol is often an important part of social life in Japan, and there's even a ...

The Holy Grail of language study is, of course, learning to think in that language without translating everything from your ...

The Japanese language is a syllable-based system in which you can pronounce the sounds ka, ki, ku, ke and ko, ...

With any language, there are certain words that are guaranteed to cause problems for foreigners -- our brains excel at ...

The Japanese language has three writing systems to communicate the written word: hiragana, the syllable-based system used for expressing basic ...

It seems that a Japanese city can't be complete until it has a big tower for tourists to visit and ...

When I came to Japan in 1991, I was extremely motivated to learn Japanese, which was a good thing since ...

The Japanese language is famous for being difficult to learn, and was once thought to be an invention of the ...