Lately I have been able to take quite a few new pictures of Japanglish (broken English usually seen in Japan). The Japanglish example on the first photo is a classic; in a lot of restaurants they misspell hamburger, most of the time as “hamburg” (probably because they confuse it with the German city), another way [...]
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Basic Kanji Book Vol.1 and Vol.2 are the books that got me started in learning Kanji and that I always recommend to people that is starting to learn Japanese. During my first year in Japan I used these two books intensely and was very happy with the results. The two volumes teach 500 basic kanjis [...]
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Nowadays some people still tend to put all Asian people together, they think they are all the same, have a very similar language and all think alike. If we only take into account that China has three times more population than all Europe together, the diversity has to be wider. To clarify, I will write [...]
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A co-worker sent me this picture, she was laughing her ass off. At first glance, it seems like a kid with a supercool sweater with a Japanese character. The problem is that the character 痔 means “hemorrhoid” in Japanese. Probably the designer confused the character 侍, which means “samurai” and is pronounced “ji”, with the [...]
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Japanese is a language with tons of homophone words. Having many homophones makes it easier to write poems, jokes and tongue-twisters than using other languages. Tong-twisters (早口言葉) are easy to create but some of them are extremely difficult to pronounce without twisting your tongue
If you are learning Japanese these are some basic 早口言葉:
バスガス爆発(ばすがすばくはつ)(basu [...]
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This post is for all of you who want to learn Japanese or who are starting to study Japanese.
1.- Learn Hiragana and Katakana
The first step to learn Japanese is to learn the syllabaries Katakana and Hiragana. You can start learning Japanese without knowing Hiragana and Katakana but I would never recommend it. What would you [...]
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Found in a Joi’s twitt.
Some other examples of japanglish or engrish:
There are many of these translations in Japan, China and Asia in general. I think it’s normal to make mistakes and learn from them, I’m making lots of them right now. But for official and public stuff they should do it perfect, I would at [...]
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I was thinking that “in the red” (English), “赤字 - red characters” (Chinese and Japanese) and “números rojos - red numbers” (Spanish); are all similar expressions which have “red” in common and they are all referred to the same concept: budget deficit. It’s interesting ¿Why most of the cultures associate the red color with negative [...]
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Every year Japanese choose a kanji character that represents the society feeling of the year that ends. The most voted character this year was 偽 (gi, nise), it means “falsehood, lie, deceive, pretend”.
The bit internal problem in Japan this year was the loss of more than 50 million records from the [...]
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I’ve been some years learning Japanese, during the learning process I’m using many tools, tutorials, resources I found on the net. In this post I will list which I consider the best bookmarks everyone should know if you are in the process of learning Japanese.
Grammar:
Guidetojapanese: the best web I know to learn the basic Japanese [...]
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