While I was at the beach this morning I wrote a post on my personal blog about the importance of getting away from your computer and office to get work done. I figured I would write a bit here on Japanese Words about how important it is to do the same thing when you are studying. When I was a college student, I spent a lot of my time studying near a computer or...

The second Japanese class on Edufire ended today and Eri had a lot of fun teaching it. Thank all of those who attended. I hope you enjoyed the classes and learned some new Japanese. Eri has posted a couple new classes as well. One for those wanting to learn to read and write Japanese (hiragana and katakana) and another class for practicing conversational speaking...

Japanese has two words for “to exist”. Unlike English, which uses different words depending on whether the object is singular or plural, Japanese uses different words depending on whether or not the object is alive . います (imasu) is used when discussing plants and animals (including humans) and あります (arimasu) is used for basically every...

It depends. Probably not the answer that you were hoping for, but bare with me for a second. It depends on whether you want to learn to speak Japanese or if you also want to learn to read and write. If you want to speak Japanese (which is the case for most people) then it is actually much easier than most people think. The reason for this is that there are fewer...

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...