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 …
4 Min read
Try These 15 Japanese Tongue Twisters!
We all know about Sally and how she sells seashells by the seashore. This is just one example of a tongue twister. Many try to repeat a tongue twister …
3 Min read
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, …
6 Min read
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 …
4 Min read
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 …
5 Min read
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 …
4 Min read
How Hard is it to Learn Japanese?
Learning a new language is no easy feat, especially Japanese. It can take years to even half-decently learn a language. That’s why the question, “how hard is it to learn …
4 Min read
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 …
2 Min read
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 …