Some tim ago I had suggested changing your Twitter settings to use Japanese language as one more way to immerse yourself in Japanese on a daily basis. This helps you learn to not only recognize these words, but do it very quickly and eventually reach close to native-level speed. フォロー (foroo) – follow (can be used… Read More »
As I gradually hone my translation skills through Gengo.com, I’m learning not just new words in Japanese, but more effective ways of researching word meanings and their proper translations in English. When translating in an environment where conveying the meaning of the original text accurately is critical, there are often cases where only one word or phrase would… Read More »
These days I’ve been listening frequently to NHK’s 「社会の見方・私の視点」 (Societal perspective / My point of view), which is a news podcast that talks about a diverse set of topics including government, economics, world politics, business, industry, and many others. Needless to say, the Japanese is extremely high level and there are many words that you would… Read More »
(Please note, this post was an April fools joke.) As it’s now the first of the month, in this post I’d like to focus on a first-person pronoun I’ve been hearing alot lately. While modern English has pretty much only “I”, Japanese has many of these words including “boku”, “watashi”, “atashi”, and even “washi” (and that’s… Read More »
In Japanese, differences in position, experience, and age are considered very important and are built into the language itself in the form of words that indicate where someone is with respect to others. This concept is expressed in the terms 先輩 (senpai), which refers to someone older or with more experience, and 後輩 (kouhai), which… Read More »
In previous posts I talked about a few theories about why Japanese has so many loanwords, especially from English. This time I’d like to discuss some of the specific words themselves. Once the Katakana alphabet is learned, loanwords become a great help as many of them can be understood by English-speakers by simply sounding them out without having to… Read More »
For this post I’ve decided to create a vocabulary list for scientific terms in Japanese. I’m personally interested in science and enjoy trying to read Japanese magazines and books written about science, and I hope this list inspires some of you to try out the same. I will try to stay to pretty general terms… Read More »
Japanese, like many other languages, has a large set of terms to refer to different family members (お姉さん, お兄さん, etc.). One special thing about these words is that many of them can even be used to refer to a non family member, including someone you just met on the street and are meeting for the first… Read More »