Learn Japanese Online - JOI Teachers blog

Learn Japanese vocabulary, Kanji and phrases with this free blog with a YouTube video for audio learning, vocabulary lists and English Translation !
Every week, a professional Japanese teacher posts a new blog .

Previous blog archives from 2006 - mid-February 2014.

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Japanese language

The Japanese language or Nihongo, is a complex language with 3 writing methods (hiragana, katakana and kanji) as well as idioms, proverbs, and local dialects, and linguistic idiocynracies. The Japanese teacher blogs in this blog category goes into some of these aspects in detail.


Japanese alphabets The Japanese language is often known as being one of the most difficult languages to learn since it has not one but three different alphabets — hiragana, katakana and kanji — which can be differentiated both by the method of writing them, and their uses. In this weekly blog from one of the Japanese teachers at JOI, Itaya sensei, she explains some great language learning tips t...
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Japanese counter words When you are learning Japanese for the first time, one of the things that you first stumble upon is the variety of counter words. As you progress to learn more advanced Japanese, these words just seem to increase. The words often change grammatically depending on the numbers proceeding them, and they can alter according to the size or shape of the thing being counted. Lear...
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Japanese onomatopoeia The Japanese language has a range of onomatopoeia, some of which are familiar but others not so much. They are often broken down into 3 categories :- Giseigo, Giongo, and Gitaigo. Giseigo is the most familiar one to English speakers – it is imitating sounds people and animals make (bow wow). Giongo is a wider range of onomatopoeia which includes sounds that things make (the...
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Japanese numbers Japanese numbers come from the Chinese language and follow the traditional Chinese counting. So large numbers follow a grouping of 10,000. There are Kanji characters for the numbers and these are often used in everyday life. Learning these Kanji is essential to gaining a good understanding of many aspects of life in Japan. Imoto sensei, one of the teachers here at JOI online sch...
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Japanese double words Learning Japanese can be a hard journey. But along the way there are often moments when you feel it was worth the struggle and enjoy the experience it brings. One such moment has to be the learning of double words. These are fun way to communicate and interestingly, they create an immediate bond with the speakers. Don't believe me? Give it try next time. And read this blog ...
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