There are plenty of words in Japanese that are difficult to translate directly into English. This is one of the challenges of early efforts to learn Japanese. A good example of such words, are the often confused terms ‘otsukaresama’ (お疲れ様) and ‘gokurosama’ (ご苦労様).

Last week I wrote about using “Desu” & “Masu” when you start out learning Japanese, and this created a lot of discussion about what are the best methods for learning. I stand by my methods, because I know from experience that they have worked for me. But there is certainly more than [...]

Yesterday I came across a BBC website which contains ‘Essential Phrases‘ for learning Japanese. I’ve linked it here, but you probably won’t find it particularly useful. Not least because of the fact that they have mangled some of the simple translations that they have on the site. The most aggregious of these [...]

Over the next month or two, I intend to write about once a week with some of the things that have helped me as I’ve learned Japanese. I was going to call this series ‘How I Learned Japanese’, but I decided to go with ‘How I’ve Learned Japanese’, which suggests that it is not something [...]

Interesting article last week from Mark Schreiber in the Japan Times. In ‘Learn the coded language all Japanese know‘, Schreiber begins by discussing a form of ‘Japanese Pig Latin’ which he learned from some Japanese children, but the latter half of his article is the ‘meat and [...]

Yesterday I wrote about Japan’s Temporary Worker Problem, and today I saw an interesting article by Lisa Gay at Japan Today (originally from Metropolis), which argues the case of teaching in Japan as the ‘McJob of Asia’. The article makes a few good points.

Starting with the overall premise [...]

The other day a student asked me a question about the use of the word ‘ashi’ (足, 脚). This is a seemingly simple word, which is probably one of the first that any child or any Japanese learner will learn. But it does come with a few quirks…

First of all, the word ‘ashi’ roughly translates as [...]

Yesterday I was teaching English to a small group of mostly retired Japanese people, and we were discussing the differences between the English and Japanese languages. While this is certainly a vast simplification, the Japanese language tends to be more focused on ‘bang for your buck’, by trying to squeeze the most meaning possible from [...]

According to the Japan Times today, sales in language related businesses in Japan have fallen for the fourth straight year, with a 5.2% drop to 767.2 billion yen in fiscal 2008. Foreign language schools dropped some 5.6%, with the drop in sales to adults the most marked, with a 9.1% decrease. [...]