Ganbatte is a great Japanese word. It is used all the time, and has a meaning which is actually very easy to pick up and understand. This makes it a very popular word for even the most green Japanese speaker.

In its most common usage, Ganbatte is used to convey encouragement or support. You can [...]

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).

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 [...]

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 [...]