Politeness can be a very big issue in Japan, and the Japanese language displays this. Japanese honorifics can be fairly complex and to fully go over the system is very …
Japanese Onomatopoeia: A Guide
Onomatopoeia are words that describe how something sounds. Examples include bam, pow, or meow. In English, you might expect to hear/read onomatopoeia in children’s books about what animals or in …
50 Japanese Words You Need to Know Before Going to Japan
Going to Japan? You might be wondering how much Japanese you need to know. In some places you can get by with virtually no Japanese and only English. In others, …
Let’s Eat! Japanese Phrases For Eating Out
One of the universal aspects of humanity that transcends cultural or language boundaries is hunger. We all must receive nutrients somehow or another. One of our great pastimes of the …
Japanese Grammar: Get to Grips with the Basics
The English language and the Japanese language have very strong differences that can seem off-putting to a native speaker of either language to attempt to learn the other. When focussing …
Japanese Particles: an Introduction
Japanese is a language that is not dependent upon sentence structure so much as it is dependent upon particles (in Japanese, joshi, 助詞). Particles are characters that relate a noun …
Happy New Year in Japanese (and Other Greetings)
New Year’s Day marks the end of weeks of winter celebration. There was Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and then New Year’s Eve right at the December’s end. Students wrapped up their …
Is Your Stomach Standing? 8 Common Japanese Idioms
Japanese is a language with a rich reservoir of idioms. There are lists and dictionaries of Japanese idioms out there, which are worth looking at as a reference or just …
Japanese Sentence Structure Explained
In English, there is a concrete grammatical structure. In a simple sentence, you have the subject, the verb, and the predicate. Of course, this changes as we get into more …
Meccha Uzai! 10 Japanese Slang Words You Should Know
From the outside, Japanese may seem like one of the most polite languages out there. Because of all the bowing, calm gestures, and Japanese honorifics, you may be shocked to …