katu– Author –

You study some Japanese, you feel like you are getting somewhere, and then someone sends you a message that reads りょ！www and you are completely lost again. Written Japanese in chats, games, and social media follows different rules fro...

If you have watched enough anime, you already know more Japanese than you think. やった, すごい, かわいい and a dozen others are probably sitting in your head right now, picked up without any studying. That is a real head start. The catc...

Greetings are the first Japanese most people learn, and also the first place where a textbook answer can sound slightly off. こんにちは is correct, but it is not what a coworker says to you at 8 a.m. さようなら means goodbye, but saying ...

Open a Japanese book, menu, or manga page and you will see three completely different kinds of characters mixed together in the same sentence. Some are round and simple. Some are sharp and angular. Some look like tiny, complicated drawin...

You can have a great trip to Japan without speaking any Japanese. Signs are bilingual in the places tourists go, staff are patient, and translation apps do a decent job. But a handful of phrases changes the experience. Ordering without p...

A small number of words does a huge amount of work in any language. In Japanese, a few hundred common words will carry you through most everyday situations, and the first hundred are the ones you will hear again and again. This list is e...

You have learned a few Japanese words. You can recognize ねこ and maybe すし. Then you try to actually write something in Japanese on your phone, and nothing happens. Your keyboard only produces English letters. This is the part almost n...

If you have ever looked at Japanese writing and felt completely lost, you are not alone. The good news is that Japanese has a friendly starting point, and it is called hiragana. Almost every Japanese learner begins here, whether they are...