Japanese Articles
Learning Through Living: Placards for your house
Happy new year all! I'm here to present you with a special お年玉 this year: the start of our original series Learning Through Living! In Learning Through Living, we'll be providing you with study materials to help you learn Japanese as you go throu... More... 2 Comments
Ringing in the New Year in Japan
In the west, the New Year is rung in with drinks, countdowns and New Year's Eve parties. But what about in Japan? How do the Japanese bring in the new year?Read on, and see how to celebrate the New Year Japan-style! New Years and Christmas In th... More... 0 Comments
Food for New Years: Cooking Osechi Ryori
Hard to believe it's almost the new year! And with the new year comes all the festivities and foods particular to the new year! Today we're going to look at some recipies for Japanese New Year food called Osechi-Ryouri (おせち料理). What is Osechi? J... More... 0 Comments
Review and more gobi
We are coming to the end of the fourth major section of the guide. Do you feel like your Japanese has improved? We've come to the point where we've learned enough conjugations to be able to start mixing them together in various useful combinati... More... 1 Comments
Casual Patterns and Slang
So far, for every grammar we have covered, we also went over all the casual variations as well. However, even though we have already covered all the casual forms, truly mastering casual speech in Japanese requires far more than just learning th... More... 0 Comments
Bug Fix: Fixed Problem with saving test scores
I'm sorry to say that this morning (天皇誕生日 to be exact) I woke up and discovered that the scores from tests were not correctly saving in the database. I have found and fixed the problem, and I am truly sorry for any issues it may have caused you a... More... 0 Comments
Making requests （～ください、～ちょうだい、～なさい、command form）
Politely (and not so politely) making requests Similar to asking for favors, which we learned in the last lesson, there are also various ways to make requests in Japanese. This is effectively the Japanese way of saying, "please do X". We'll fir... More... 3 Comments
Numbers and Counting
Numbers and counting in Japanese are difficult enough to require its own section. First of all, the number system is in units of four instead of three, which can make converting into English quite difficult. Also, there are things called counte... More... 0 Comments
Giving and Receiving （あげる、やる、くれる、もらう）
Japanese people like gifts One thing about Japanese culture is that they're big on giving gifts. There are many different customs involving giving and receiving gifts (お歳暮、お中元、etc.) and when Japanese people go traveling, you can be sure that t... More... 0 Comments
Trying something out or attempting to do something （～てみる、volitional+とする）
Let's try some stuff In English, we use the word, "try" to mean both "to try something out" and "to make an effort to do something". In Japanese, these are separate grammatical expressions. For instance, "I tried the cherry flavor" and "I trie... More... 0 Comments