The Reason Japanese Are the Way They Are: Junior High School
The question of "What makes the Japanese the way they are?" is an interesting one, and I'm certainly not the ...
Tag: Japanese language
All About Japanese Females
Being a healthy male, I'm naturally fascinated with the opposite sex, and I find the subject of Japanese females to ...
Japan’s Newest Internet Trend
Like most countries, the keitai (mobile phone) has become a huge part of life in Japan, and for the younger ...
Funny Words in Japanese
One of the first things you do when learning a foreign language is, of course, to investigate all the "naughty" ...
Fixating on Japanese Phrases and Kanji
One interesting side effect of studying a foreign language like Japanese is finding yourself naturally fixating on various aspects of ...
Japanese Memory Tricks
Quick, what's the square root of five? I have no idea, but my wife knows: it's 2.2360679. How about the ...
The FUN Way to Learn Japanese
There are many approaches to learning a foreign language -- the Army Method (stress on learning through memorization), the Grammar ...
On the Japanese Custom of Taking Responsibility
One concept you encounter quite a lot in Japan is sekinin (seh-kee-neen), meaning responsibility or duty. While the James Clavell ...
More Instant Japanese Words from English Ones
Last time I talked about words in English that happen to have meaning in Japanese, too. We keep coming up ...
Famous Japanese Sometimes Beget Famous Japanese
Who's your daddy? While Japan as a society is very much a meritocracy, with success largely going to those who ...
Little Mis-Pronounciations of English in Japanese
The Japanese, of course, use a lot of English in their daily lives, even if serves mainly as a decoration, ...
Understanding Kanji: The Basics
The Japanese writing system is based on kanji, the pictographs evolved by the Chinese starting around 2500 B.C., and China ...
Reflections on Beef Bowl and Japanese Culture
Over the weekend I took my son out for a bowl of gyudon, steamed beef over rice, the most popular ...
Funny Japanese place names: Eromanga??
There are some pretty hilarious place names in the world, like Hell, Michigan, Hookersville, West Virginia or Lord Berkeley's Knob, ...
How many words for “rice” do the Japanese have?
There are many large and small challenges you encounter when learning Japanese. For example, it's difficult being at peace with ...
Learning Japanese can be easy. No, really!
With a sentence structure and grammar unlike anything used in the West along with three different writing systems, learning the ...
Learning about the subtleties of Japan through children’s programming
Living in Japan can bring you into contact with concepts that may be difficult to wrap your mind around. While ...
Gaijin to get Language Requirement to Live in Japan?
There was a minor dust-up on the Internets in Japan this week after the government suggested that it might add ...
Barrier to white people learning Japanese: Kanji
Without a doubt, one of the big barriers to learning Japanese are the kanji, the Chinese characters that communicate meaning ...
Thoughts on men and women and marriage, things that surprise foreigners in Japan, and how we sound to the Japanese
Yesterday my wife and I went to our favorite restaurant and noticed that the girl who had been working there ...
Learning about trust in a drinking establishment in Japan, why Japanese kids love New Year’s Day, and what is a “tish”?
When a person goes to live in a foreign country, it's natural that he encounter some words and concepts that ...
Some thoughts on the series “Lost,” how to brighten a Japanese salaryman’s day, and how learning Japanese can get you fewer dates
I've caught the "Lost" bug, and am enjoying watching the series on DVD here in San Diego. One interesting aspect ...
Needing a sixth sense to communicate with people from other countries, this year’s kanji, and all about “smorking”
Talking with people from other cultures often requires a sense for words that's quite unrelated to speaking a foreign language. ...
The plight of the poor Japanese taxi driver, finding government waste very close to home, and how to sound like a dirty old man in Japanese
I wrote a couple weeks ago that taxi fares were going to be going up 7%, a rare instance of ...
