Tag: Japanese language

Last time I wrote about how the name a person calls another says a lot about their relationship, whether they ...

When I was at Narita last week I went into a bookshop to browse for Japan-related books we might want ...

Last time I wrote about our trip to Taiwan, which was both chaotic and fun. While I couldn't make myself ...

One thing I like about learning a foreign language is the insight I gain into my own brain. For example, ...

Yesterday I went to take a photo at an automated machine, which I needed for some documentation I had to ...

There are some fundamental differences between Japan and the U.S. which I like to explore from time to time. The ...

Kanji is the primary writing system used in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. In the case of Japanese, kanji ...

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test (and the kanji practice for the Nintendo DS) announces the ...

Anime characters are generally organized into basic archetypes, and whenever a new character is introduced, fans are able to categorize ...

Transliteration is the act of moving from one writing system to another, which is never an easy task. When expressing ...

I write a lot about the theory and practice of moe (mo-eh), since it's a subject that's dear to me. ...

The Internets have been buzzing with news that the word kawaii had been officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary, ...

One of the more interesting things about living in Japan is getting used to using a "name stamp." While signatures ...

The Japanese language has not one but three writing systems: hiragana, a syllable-based system for expressing sounds and grammatical particles; ...

I saw an interesting thread on Japan's ubiquitous BBS 2ch entitled, "Things Japanese people do abroad that mark them as ...

Last weekend I went to the local home center to pick up some parts for a speaker system I was ...

One word that's become quite well-known in anime- and Japan-centric circles is kawaii, which means cute, pretty, adorable, and in ...

Today is a very special day, one I've been waiting for for a long time: Pocky Day, 2011. The Japanese ...

I've written before about how anime is a very stylized world, where characters can have impossibly large and expressive eyes ...

Although all languages share the basic building blogs of grammar, with nouns, verbs, and adjectives, passive and active voice and ...

Every once in a while I encounter a Japanese person who, for whatever reason, can't accept the fact that I ...

Learning a new language means getting used to new linguistic concepts, and there are constructs in Japanese that are very ...

Japanese names are generally written in kanji, and just as there are alternative ways to spell Western names (though I ...

A language is a living expression of the thoughts and minds of the people speaking it, and as such, each ...