If you’re a student of Japanese and have gotten into hiragana and kanji, you’re probably familiar with “furigana”. “Furigana” is ...

The Year of the Dragon is almost here! I hope all of you, my readers, have a happy, healthy, and successful 2012. :) In Japanese, there ar...

"The Four Treasures" (文房四宝 bunbou-shihou) is a nickname for the tools of traditional Japanese calligraphy: the brush, the inkstone...

If you don't have the time or money to pursue formal classes, learning a foreign language can be tricky and discouraging. Interaction wi...

You've probably seen the adorable Japanese cat "Maru" of Youtube fame, but if you're studying written Japanese, the blog M...

Over on the Immortal Geisha forums , user "tzippurah" is known for uploading a ton of Japanese magazine scans related to kimono. I...

Tonight, after a very long dry spell, rain is drumming steadily on the roof of the house. In honor of the storm, our topic is "rain wom...

Continuing this series, the purpose of which is to help learn what is Japanese by learning what is not, tonight we're going to touch ver...

If you've ever seen a Japanese calendar, even if you can't read any you might have seen a cycle of kanji characters that appear on e...

English is routinely called one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. There is one instance, though, where English is nice ...

Another quick post! Humility is a big deal in Japanese culture, and one of the ways this humility shows is in gift giving. When handing a ...

In English, if you want to quickly tally up something or count something, you write out four vertical hatch marks and one angled across on t...

A quick post tonight... sometimes people ask how you say "the" in Japanese. This one is easy: there is no "the" in Japan...

How do you cuss in Japanese? This is one of the questions I sometimes get asked when people find out I can speak (some) Japanese and lived i...

This is a fine detail that can lead to big misunderstandings, so it's worth mentioning if you're going to be talking with anyone in ...

Even if you don't know any Japanese, you can start picking out the word "ne" pretty quickly in anime, movies, or real-life con...

While not every color in Japanese is named after a thing, as a languages geek and visual person in general I find some of the traditional wo...

As I've mentioned before, Japanese has a lot of set phrases that are very handy as they're used all the time in certain situations. ...

A quick post tonight! Depending on the situation, if you want to welcome someone there are a few different ways to say it. "Welcome...

Many moons ago, I watched the original Juon (The Grudge) in Japan. At the time I watched it without subtitles and my Japanese wasn't at ...