Tag: Japanese language

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 ...

One aspect of the Japanese language is its heavy use of foreign loan words, usually borrowed from English. Since the ...

In a language as different from English as Japanese is, naturally there are situations where vocabulary words from one language ...

Everyone knows that adding 'y' to the end of a noun can turn it into an adjective, like silky, messy, ...

It can be fun to study how Japanese surnames work. One of the mysteries of family names in Japan is ...

You wouldn't think a simple word like "friend" could be a potentially complex linguistic concept, but in Japan you might ...

One thing the Japanese love very much is making long speeches at official ceremonies, and when I went to my ...

It's fun to analyze the various social rules at work in Japan, most of which are completely invisible to Japanese ...

Each language has features which make them unique. Some languages like Chinese or Thai are highly tonal for example (Japanese ...

Over the weekend Star Wars Episode 1 in 3D opened in Japan, so I took my son to see the ...

Last time I talked about Donald Keene, the Japanese scholar and translator who came to Japan and took Japanese citizenship, ...

This Sunday marks the first anniversary of the terrible 9.0 earthquake and tsunamis which caused so much pain and loss ...

There are some pretty hilarious place names in the world, like Hell, Michigan, Hookersville, West Virginia or Lord Berkeley's Knob, ...

Perhaps it comes from my long years translating and selling visual novels, Japan's interactive multi-story love-simulation games, but it's my ...

One English word the Japanese get a lot of mileage out of is "the," pronounced za in Japanese due to ...

Today is February 29th, which is possible because 2012 is a Leap Year. In Japanese, Leap Year is urudoshi, but ...

One interesting aspect of living in Japan is learning to read the unique body language of people around you, which ...

The Chinese writing system, kanji, is an inseparable part of the Japanese language, the same way Latin or Greek is ...

One aspect of learning a foreign language is getting a handle on its jokes, gags and other forms of humor. ...