This post is going to be really, really short.  This is just a reminder to let everyone know that the final deadline for submitting your essay for the Kanji/Kana flash cards contest  is tomorrow, Friday April 23 (Japan time). I look forward to getting all your essays and reading about your studies with...

One of the most popular posts on Japanese words has been the common Japanese Words list containing over 1000 Japanese words and kanji. That page has received quite a few comments asking for pronunciations in romaji (English Alphabet). While having romaji may seem to make studying easier when you first start out, learning using the English alphabet will actually hold...

Learning to read and write Japanese is by far the most difficult part of learning the language. There are a lot of characters and they have no resemblance to the English alphabet at all. It takes hour after hour of writing them down again and again to remember them, and soon as you stop them for a while you forget them. This was the method I used to learn Hiragana...

Regardless of whether you are just starting or have been studying for quite some time there are always stumbling points. Times when you feel you will not attain the level of fluency you had hoped, that your progress is going to slowly, or that the immediate benefits you are receiving just aren’t worth the amount of time you are spending studying Japanese. I...

Saturday  I received all 4 of the “Remember the Kanji” books. Three of the books are designed to help a Japanese learner master kanji and one is focused on learning hiragana and katakana. I will be posting reviews on all of these books once I have had a little more time to evaluate them. I started reviewing the book on learning kana and it reminded me...