| It’s a slow news week, so here’s the second part of our 博多弁講座 (hakataben kouza). This time, we look at the word “けん” (ken). This word is the Hakata-ben…
| We put a blank piece of paper up on the wall in the student area at school, for students to write the weird cultural things they noticed about Japan.…
| Unbeknownst to us over here in Japan, it turns out 2006 was designated by Congress in the US as the Year of Study Abroad! This was done to “recognize…
| Continuing the theme of social standing, another interesting facet of Japanese society is how people are called only by their title even when away from work or even after…
| It’s very hard to understand Japanese in the beginning because the structure of sentences is so completely different from English. So, unlike learning French, Spanish, or other languages with…
| Just a short post today, but a golden piece of trivia: Did you know that the name Pacman comes from Japanese? In Japanese the 擬音語 (giongo, onomatopoeia) パクパク (paku…
| In Japan, it’s very important to know a person’s social standing, as it affects the language you use when you talk to that person. This is why Japanese people…
| We received the above good question by email the other day, that we thought we should probably explain better, so we’ll be adding this information to our FAQ shortly,…
| On the surface, the English phrase “more or less“ looks like it should be the equivalent of the Japanese word 多少 (“tashou“, made up of the kanji for “many“…