Japanese learning blog
Practical guides on speaking, grammar, pronunciation, listening, and study planning, written for learners who want to use Japanese in real life.
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Japanese for Marrying Into a Japanese Family
Marrying into a Japanese family means learning a small set of high-pressure sentences, most of which you will say only once, and a much larger register you will use for decades.
17 min readJapanese for Remote Workers Moving to Japan
If your salary arrives from abroad, nobody at work will make you speak Japanese. The errands of your first month will, and after that you have to arrange the practice yourself.
18 min readJapanese for Parents: School Notes, Calls, and Forms
A child in a Japanese school generates a steady stream of paper and short phone calls. Almost all of it repeats, which means a few dozen fixed sentences cover most of the year.
19 min readJapanese in the Dojo: Commands, Counting, and Etiquette
A martial arts class runs on a small set of Japanese words repeated every session. Learn to react to them without translating and the rest of the lesson becomes about your body, not your ears.
14 min readJapanese for Tea Ceremony, Calligraphy, and Ikebana Class
A tea, calligraphy or flower lesson runs on a small set of courtesies and a specific vocabulary of tools and shapes. Learn both and you can follow a class long before you can discuss it.
14 min readReading Japanese Recipes and Cooking Terms
A Japanese recipe is short because it assumes you already know about thirty words. Learn those words and the whole page opens up, from the ingredient list to the last line of the method.
18 min readJapanese for Baseball: Stadium, Broadcast, and Cheering
Baseball gives a learner something rare: a few hundred words that repeat every few minutes, in front of a picture that explains them. It is one of the best listening classrooms in Japan.
15 min readJapanese for Gaming and Playing Online
Switching a game into Japanese puts a few hundred words in front of you every session. This guide covers the interface vocabulary you will meet on almost every screen and the short polite lines that make online play with Japanese speakers go smoothly.
13 min readJapanese for Music, Live Shows, and Concerts
Going to a live show in Japan means reading a ticket page, standing in the right queue, and understanding a few announcements. This guide gives you that vocabulary, plus the everyday language for talking about music with someone.
14 min readKiku: Listen, Ask, Obey, and Take Effect
Kiku is one of the first verbs you learn and one of the last you finish learning. The same sound covers hearing, listening, asking, obeying and a medicine taking effect, and the kanji quietly tell you which one is meant.
16 min readAu: Meet, Match, Fit, and Run Into Trouble
Au is three verbs wearing one pronunciation. Learn which kanji goes with which particle and a whole family of everyday sentences becomes predictable, from tomodachi ni au to jiko ni au.
16 min readKaeru and Kaesu: Return, Change, Swap, and Repay
Six common Japanese verbs share the sound kaeru, and two more share kaesu. The kanji tells you which one is meant, and the verb class decides whether the te-form is kaette or kaete.
16 min readPractical guides
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