Japanese
Every year the Japanese people choose one kanji character that represents the society’s sentiment regarding the year that is coming to an end. The most voted character this year has been 絆 (kizuna, きずな), which means “bonds”, normally used when talking about the bonds and collaboration among people, friends, family… In this case it has [...]
Japanese language is written using three alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. However since Japan began being “connected” to the Western world there have been several attempts to write the Japanese language using our alphabet. The basic idea of all these attempts consists on emulating the pronunciation of Japanese characters the best possible way using the [...]
Japanglish is the kind of humorous English language usually seen around Japan characterized by a poor translation from Japanese to English. The results of those literal translations can be very funny. Japanglish is also known as Engrish. Miguel Michán has sent me this great Japanglish example. Can somebody decipher this Japanglish text? Other Japanglish posts: [...]
If you are not studying Japanese you will probably not be interested in reading this article. It’s been a long time since I don’t write about the Japanese language. After many years studying the language I still learn new things every day. The other day I was curious to know more about the “々” character, [...]
In Japan we don’t have blu-ray… we have bRu-ray Other Japanglish posts: Some more Japanglish There is a staff who can speak English This vehicle is done to weaken an air conditioner Fuculty
The Japanese language has three different alphabets: hiragana, katakana and kanji. Hiragana and katakana represent syllables and have a fixed number of characters (46 each, 92 in total). Kanji characters are much more complex; in theory there are more than 50,000 kanji characters. The good news is that “officially” only 1,945 of them can be [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
