Tag: Japanese language

Nihongo, also known as Japanese, is the language spoken in the nation of Japan, as well as Hawaii (ha-ha). Its ...

Sometimes part of the fun of studying a language like Japanese is "surfing" the linguistic elements that are totally different ...

I see that Prime Minister Aso is set to release a 23 trillion yen stimulus package to help deal with ...

There's an interesting category of vocabulary words made up of four kanji characters, which probably represents a grammatical construction left ...

I talked a couple weeks ago about how the Japanese language lacks definite and indefinite articles like "a" and "the" ...

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

I've started watching an anime series with the rather unique name of A Certain Magical Index, which is about magic-using ...

For whatever reason, there are certain subjects I never managed to study during high school or college, including chemistry, philosophy, ...

Part of learning to read and write kanji involves learning about the building blocks (called radicals) that make up the ...

Like most countries, Japan has its unsavory elements, including organized crime. Japan's version of the Italian mafia are the yakuza ...

I saw that Toshiba recently won a special award for its JW-10 Word Processor, a breakthrough product that allowed the ...

There are many important milestones that a foreigner trying to master Japanese will face. Ordering in a restaurant for the ...

There's no doubt about it: the most complex part of learning Japanese is kanji, unless you're fortunate enough to already ...

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

Like many people in Japan, I am a furo-bito, or a person who likes taking baths in natural hot springs. ...

One of the many products J-List carries is a fun film called Big Dreams, Little Tokyo, a movie I like ...

It's not every day a gaijin living in rural Japan opens the newspaper to see an ad for Wendy's staring ...

Here are some more Japanese idioms, which can be fun for foreigners to pick up and use since no one ...

Stereotypes are not good since they cause us to make assumptions about people from other countries before we've gotten to ...

The Arabic number system used in the West is based on 1,000, but the kanji-derived number system used in Japan ...

One thing foreigners visiting Japan should be sure and try is "real" ramen. Thanks to its cheapness, virtually everyone in ...

If you want to learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, you'll need a few things. First, ...

I wrote last time that one of the challenges of living in Japan is getting accustomed to Japanese-accented English, sometimes ...

During the Sports Festival, I engaged in a little hobby of mine: hunting for bizarre English T-shirts. For some reason, ...