Tag: Japanese language

If you've paid attention while watching Japanese anime or, ahem, other videos in Japanese, you've might have noticed the word ...

For some reason, studying the etymologies of Japanese company names is fascinating to me. Like how the founder of Canon ...

When you can't read or write kanji, the idea of being able to recognize hundreds or thousands of the symbols ...

One interesting concept I learned about soon after coming to Japan was jiko shokai, which just means "self introduction" but ...

It never fails: you're going about our business in Japan, when suddenly you come face to face with some really ...

One of the stranger aspects of Japan's kanji-based writing system is the way many people lose some ability to write ...

I wrote recently about how Japanese names are (usually) written in kanji, and how there are many possible ways of ...

Japanese names are generally written in kanji, the Chinese characters introduced to Japan around the 6th century A.D. Family names, ...

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

I wrote recently about how Japanese ESL students were sometimes surprised that Americans have a subject in school called English, ...

If you've listened to spoken Japanese at all you've probably heard the word desu, often pronounced with the last syllable ...

There's nothing more interesting than studying a foreign language, of learning the way its unique grammatical rules work so you ...

Last time I talked about how there are times when gaijin in Japan might find that some doors open for ...

Between studying Japanese for four years at SDSU and living here for 17, I've pretty much got the Japanese language ...

As an American living in Japan, I know how surprised Japanese can get when foreigners internalize the society around them ...

I like to read sci-fi novels with mind-bogglingly big ideas in them. One series I enjoyed was the Uplift Saga ...

Like many other Japanese men, my father-in-law likes baseball. I mean, he really likes Baseball, so much that he'll watch ...

I've got a grammatical problem: my son, who began Junior High School in April, has started learning formal English grammar ...

You've been in Japan too long when you can pronounce the constellation of Orion like the Japanese do, which sounds ...

Japan has entered its rainy season, a month-long period when it will rain most every day as the country does ...

When you study a language like Japanese, you learn many rules that make up the grammar, like the unique particles ...

One of the first things you learn as a foreigner in Japan is that people here will assume you're intimately ...

"Even monkeys fall from trees." This is one of the many bits of wisdom you can glean by studying Japanese ...

Part of the challenge of studying a foreign language is learning to categorize and separate the new concepts you encounter. ...