Tag: Japanese language

It's funny how words change as they move from one language to another. The word "sabotage" supposedly came from the ...

Today one of my Twitter followers asked me, "How did you learn Japanese?" That's quite a big topic, of course, ...

You can learn a lot about Japan through its language, including such simple things as first and second-person pronouns, which ...

My son is in hardcore study mode right now as he prepares for his important high school entrance exam in ...

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the "kanji of the year," the single character that ...

In my Twitter feed I post various things, including new items added to the J-List site, random anime pictures I've ...

I write a lot about the different memes that come along in Japan, and how they interact with the Internet ...

I wrote last time about how names work in Japanese, and how it can be fun to assign kanji to ...

One area of Japan gaijin are often fascinated with is the way kanji names work. While foreign names are generally ...

I wrote recently about how the Japanese use the katakana writing system to phonetically represent foreign place names like "Grand ...

Back when I was in college I visited the Grand Canyon, and happened to see a poster advertising an IMAX ...

One thing you have to understand about the Japanese is, they like lists, such as the Three Beautiful Sights of ...

Cell phones have been a big part of life in Japan ever since they went mainstream in the mid 1990s, ...

There's a class of four-kanji compound word called yoji-jukugo which are used in Japanese quite a lot. Rather than disliking ...

Like many other English speaking gaijin, I came to Japan as a teacher of ESL, imparting my native language to ...

There are times when Japanese as a language is surprisingly easy. While poor Japanese people have to memorize the names ...

I like to pick up on random bits of Japanese language and see what they can teach us, and one ...

When I first got to Japan, I was extremely motivated to learn Japanese, which was a good thing since the ...

One of the more welcome aspects of the Japanese language is the system of "grammatical particles" which mark parts of ...

I still remember my first day of Japanese class back at SDSU, when our teacher taught us one of the ...

Last week I went into Tokyo on a buying trip to look for extra-cool products for the coming Christmas season, ...

My son continues his juken studies, preparing for the difficult high school entrance exams he'll be taking early next year. ...

The Japanese language is very expressive, and there are some interesting phrases one encounters from time to time, which I ...

Everyone knows that the Japanese use Chinese characters, or kanji, as part of their writing system, but since kanji are ...