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Written By: guyjin on October 1, 2011 No Comment


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 [...]

Written By: guyjin on March 12, 2010 2 Comments
Japanese Words #4 – Otsukaresama & Gokurosama

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).

Written By: guyjin on October 7, 2009 No Comment

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 [...]

Written By: guyjin on September 28, 2009 3 Comments

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 [...]

Written By: guyjin on September 19, 2009 4 Comments

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 [...]

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