Japanese Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia. That’s a big scary term with a much less daunting meaning: any word that mimics a sound. In English, onomatopoeia consists of words like “boom”, “pop”, and “cock-a-doodle-do”.
Of course, Japanese also has onomatopoeia (which they call 擬態語 : ぎたいご). They have LOTS of it…
Do you know these Japanese words?
These are the latest additions to the Nihonshock Vocabulary Bank Want to see all the words?
だいごみ [daigomi] – This word refers to the most interesting/pleasurable/thrilling thing in some category. The word 醍醐 comes from…
[Read More]べつばら [betsubara] is your “separate stomach.” Specifically, it’s the (imaginary) one where you always seem to have room for dessert even after a big dinner.
[Read More]36 Cool and Obscure Words (WOTD Roundup)
For the last month or so, (almost) every day, I’ve been posting a #Japanese #WOTD on Twitter. Since information on twitter is quickly buried, I’ll leave a record here for the sake of data permanence…
Reading Practice: the Dead Parrot Sketch in Japanese
Month Python’s dead parrot sketch. It’s deservingly one of the most famous sketches in all comedy, in which John Cleese (Mr. Praline) attempts to return a dead parrot to a stubborn pet shop owner…
Numbers and Time Cheat Sheet (PDF)
For those of you who missed it because you aren’t connected with Nihonshock on either Twitter or Facebook (shame on you!), I just released a digital version of one of the most popular sheets in the full Cheat Sheet Pack!
5 Traits of a Successful Japanese Learner
Let’s be honest, learning a language is tough. While some learners go on to be highly proficient speakers, living and working in their second language, a large number (probably a majority) either give up half way or struggle to progress beyond the intermediate level.
Fortunately, whether or not a person will become an advanced-level bilingual doesn’t seem to have any relation to their IQ or age…
Shorthand Kanji Forms
Shorthand kanji forms (called 略字:ryakuji in Japanese) are something you’re unlikely to come across in your Japanese studies (since they’re technically incorrect), and thanks to the everything-becoming-digital age are less useful than they once were.
Japanese Cheat Sheet Pack
At last, the time has come to unveil what I’ve spent the last several months working on: a pack of Japanese cheat sheets for intermediate to advanced Japanese learners.
How to use Japanese Counters
This blog topic will take on one of the more neglected topics of Japanese language. And by “neglected”, I don’t mean that it is not covered in text books, what I mean is that the coverage given in textbooks tends to lack structure and be inadequate for advanced learning.
Taking Kanji Apart: Radicals and Components
As any learner knows, kanji are an inescapable and daunting aspect of learning Japanese. There’s more than 2000 of the little devils and each one has multiple pronunciations, multiple meanings, and a predefined stroke order. That’s a lot to learn, so it’s understandable that most teachers and books avoid…
7 polite phrases foreigners aren’t supposed to know
One of the joys of learning Japanese is seeing that shocked and dumbfounded look on native speakers’ faces when you fire off a difficult word or phrase that even they probably wouldn’t have come up with. You get to smile snobbishly and think to yourself: Ha! you didn’t see THAT coming, did you!?
More from Nihonshock…
