I was meaning to put this up last week and I noticed over the past 7 days that the pile had mysteriously disappeared eg my wife had eaten them.

So anyway I grabbed the last one for your viewing pleasure below ^^

The front and back of the box provide a fun way to practice your hiragana, katakana and kanji reading while you munch on your own yummy chocolate or salivate over your computer screen.

A few simple ones to get you started – おいしい (o-i-shi-i = delicious, yummy), マシュマロ (ma-shu-ma-ro = marshmellow), イチゴ (i-chi-go = strawberry) and チョコレート (cho-ko-re-e-to= chocolate). Chocolate is often abbreviated to just チョコ (cho-ko).

The small ュ in マシュマロ gets added to シ (shi) to form シュ (shu) while the small ョ in チョコレート forms with チ (chi) to give us チョ (cho) in チョコレート. And finally the ー in チョコレート elongates the vowel sound preceding it so “re” becomes “ree”.

Here’s a much larger version of the back of the box if you feel like going nuts on the translation.

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Thanks to the internet, we now have instant access to more language learning material than you could use in a hundred lifetimes. A large part of that video material can be found on YouTube.

There’s always been plenty of user uploaded Japanese videos but in the past few years, many of the Japanese TV channels have come on board and now we can enjoy video clips from the likes of NHK, TBS, Fuji TV and much more.

While it’s easy enough to click around YouTube all day long, if you’re really serious about immersion you probably want to just have a bunch of videos lined up so you can leaving them playing all day long and suck in all that glorious Japanese goodness.

YouTube has the ability to do playlists but having an app right on your desktop that lets you set and forget your daily immersion playlists is pure gold – and recently I found such a beast – Minitube.

Minitube is a cross platform app that allow you to search YouTube from your desktop. You simply type in either a keyword (“Versailles PV”) or a channel name (“jaxachannel”) and it will instantly bring back all the videos that match your query.

Front Screen

In the search results screen, you have three tabs to sort by – Most Relevant, Most Recent, Most Viewed. You can double-click any video to start playing, switch to full screen, change video quality and more.

Search Results

The best part is once you start playing any video, Minitube will just continue playing the next video for as long as there is one. So if you’re wanting to listen to your favourite band, you simply type in their name and then click the first result and you can sit back for the next few hours as Minitube rolls through every match on YouTube.

You may have noticed I added “PV” to the name of the Japanese band “Versailles” (Check them out – they’re great btw). “PV” stands for “Promotional Video”, which will mean YouTube brings back the official PV videos uploaded by the band or record label rather than the (generally) crappy user uploaded versions.

Minitube is available for Mac, Windows and Linux and is also available for instant download in the Mac App Store, where I got it for around AUD$10.

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Do you know what konkatsu means? Could you name the traditional Japanese art in which a person sits on a stage and tells a funny story? What does the phrase, “Shiranu ga hotoke,” mean?

Challenging the applicant’s knowledge not just of Japanese language but also of Japanese culture, the first ever J-CLUE test will be held in October 2011. From AKB48 to Mount Fuji, questions deal with both modern and traditional Japanese culture.

Launched by J-CLUB (The Japanese Culture and Language Understanding Board) and the Hiragana Times the test takes a revolutionary approach to language learning by focusing of cultural aspects of Japan

Depending on your fluency, you can take the test in either English or Japanese.

Over 260 academic institutions, including universities, colleges and Japanese language schools, in Japan have now signed up to support the new J-CLUE test. To find out more about the kind of questions the test will cover please visit the J-Clue website.

The first test will be based in Japan and applications for the first test are currently being accepted.

The cost of the test is ¥4,500 which compares favourably to the fee charged for the JLPT (¥5,500) and profits will be donated to the East Japan Disaster Fund.

Source: Hiragana Times

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Restaurants in Japan are a culinary and cultural adventure. Knowing how to act is crucial to speaking the language. They’re also great places to practice many facets of conversational Japanese!

So, here are 5 steps to ordering food in Japan.

Find a Place to Eat

Most foreigners know about sushi and ramen. But there are many things to eat and it’s hard to list them all so here’s just a few of the more popular meals:

Yakitori

• Udon (うどん), a noodle usually served in soup
• Soba (そば), a thin buckwheat noodle (which is sometimes served cold)
• Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き), a vegetable-meat-and-egg pancake with a sweet brown sauce
• Yakitori (やきとり), a kebab usually on a stick
• Yakiniku (焼き肉), where you grill your own meat at your table
• Yakisoba (焼きそば), a stir-fried noodle dish with barbecue sauce and pork

You’ll see plastic replicas of the food outside of most restaurants, so even if you can’t read Japanese, you’ll have some idea of what to expect.

The food will be softer, though, and the chopsticks won’t levitate.^^

Get A Table

The greeter will ask how many people there are – 何名さまですか。 (Nan-mei sa-ma de-su ka?)

Back Street Japanese Restaurant

You could shout “3″ at them (“San!”) which is sort of as wrong as shouting “Number Three!” in English. The server might think you are very proud of your placement in a recent race.

Here’s how you count people:

Most of these are the Japanese number followed by the word “nin”. If you have three people in your party, you say “san-nin”.

The exceptions: One person (ひとり – hitori) and two people (ふたり – futari). Everything else (yes even 178 or 352) is the normal Japanese number plus “-nin”.

You’ll be seated and given a cloth – cold in summer, hot in winter – called an oshiburi. Guidebooks will tell you to only use these on your hands. But if it’s a lunch-cart or fast food place, rub that thing wherever you want.

Order Your Food

If you have been a kind person all your life, you might be offered an English menu. You can ask for one by saying, “英語のメニューがありますか。” (pronounced roughly as Eh-go no men-yu ga aree-mass-ka?)

But mostly you’ll only have a Japanese menu. If the kanji makes your eyes bleed, look at pictures. You can point to a picture and say “kore (w)o onegaishimasu” (koh-ray-oh on-nee-gai-she-mass) – “That one, please”.

No pictures? Get crafty.

Do you have a digital camera? Sneak outside, find a yummy plastic sculpture of the food you want and photograph it. Then show the picture to the waitress with the old “Kore (w)o onegaishimasu”.

Plastic Food Display

If you know what you want – say, udon – you can order it by saying, “Udon onegaishimasu”. (ooh-don on-nee-gai-she-mass). If you want many things, you can list them all by saying “to” in between: “うどんとラメんとハンバーガーおねがいします (Udon to Ramen to Hambaagaa onegaishimasu”. (“Udon, ramen and a hamburger, please”)

What if you want more than one of something? You need to use a different set of number-counters.

If you want two bowls of udon, you can’t say “udon futari,” that means “two udon people”. The waitress might wonder, “Where are the udon people? Did they beat him in that race he was talking about?”

Instead, you should say “Udon (w)o futatsu onegaishimasu”. Can you guess what the counter is for food items? It’s “-tsu”. That “ts” should sound a tiny bit like a soft “z”. Like the staccato ‘z’ in pizza…. “pizzu!”

So where you said “futa-ri” for two people, you would say “futa-tsu” for “two plates”.

Just to clarify the w(o) I have used above. をis a Japanese particle whose job it is to mark the direct object you’re talking about eg Udon. So on your hiragana chart it is “wo” but the sound is “o” confusing hey? ^^

These are standard counters for objects in any situation, so they’re worth memorising.

Notice the “little tsu” in the hiragana column eg やっつ? The “little tsu’s” job is to double the sound of the next consonant. So the “t” from “tsu” gets doubled by the “little tsu”. Read more about it here →

Eat Your Food

The staff won’t bother you unless you call them over. This requires a polite “Excuse me,” or in Japanese, “すみません (su-mi-ma-se-n)” pronounced su-mee-mah-sen. Until I figured this out, I thought Japanese service was awful.

Food will not come out at the same time. Start eating as soon as you get it. It’s standard to say “itadakimasu” (ee-tah-dak-ee-masu) and give a little nod to the food, or quickly put your hands together like a prayer.

Three quick rules on chopsticks:

1. Don’t rub them together. It implies you have cheap, splintered chopsticks.
2. Don’t pass food between chopsticks. They do this with bones at funerals. (Really).
3. Don’t stick your chopsticks straight up into a bowl of rice. Unless you are at a funeral.

Basically, don’t bum everyone out by acting like you’re at a Japanese funeral.

Pay Your Bill

When you’re finished, take your bill to the front of the shop. There are two ways to pay: “べつべつ (be-tsu-be-tsu)” – separate – means everyone pays for what they ordered. “いっしょ (i-s-sho)” meaning “together” – the meal is evenly divided by the number of people.

Most Japanese people default to “issho,” whereas most Westerners default to “betsu-betsu”. So make sure you tell the host “betsu-betsu” if you only want to pay for what you ate.

But, you have to choose one or the other. Most Japanese people will ask for “issho” and, frankly, you should follow along if they’ve invited you out.

If you love the food (or despise it, it doesn’t really matter) express your gratitude by saying “gochisou sama deshita” (go-chee-soh-sama-desh-ta) – “Thanks for your role in preparing this food”.

Another good phrase for the chef is “おいしいです (o-i-shi-i de-su)”, pronounced oy-shee-des, which means “It’s delicious!” or “おいしかった (o-i-shi-ka-t-ta), meaning “That was delicious!”.

Enjoy your meal!

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Eryk is a former newspaper editor from Maine now teaching English in Japan with the JET Program. Find his excellent posts on all things strangely Japanese at www.thisjapaneselife.org He can also be found on Twitter – @owls_mcgee

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I read lots of children’s books, played with plenty of apps on my iPhone and computer, watched the occasional Studio Ghibli film and some anime.

I became proficient at memorising kanji but the first time I heard real-life native Japanese people, I had no freaking idea what they were saying at all.

Looking back it seems a no-brainer but at the time I was so focussed on what the textbooks were telling me to do that I completely missed one of the most obvious needs of learning a language – the need to be able to converse with a native speaker.

What’s The Point

You may be thinking ‘I can’t understand any Japanese so why would I listen to it yet – what’s the point?’

The point is that the more you listen to Japanese the more you’ll pick up on the words, phrasing, timing and everything else about how a native speaks their language.

It’s no different to how we all learnt as babies.

We listened to our parents and those around us and then regurgitated that in one way or another until we got it right. As babies we had no idea what anyone was saying but once you listen enough, it will sink in eventually.

So with that in mind let’s take a quick look at some places you can listen to native Japanese speakers and it’s all for free – nice ^_^

Stick with the longer podcasts (20-30 minutes) as you can then sit back and listen or play it in the background on your computer without having to change it every five minutes.

Podcasts

There’s an almost endless amount of Japanese podcasts available across any genre you can imagine

I don’t particularly care what I listen to as long as it sounds like the people on the other end are having fun. I lean towards comedy and music plus some news but that is normally a little boring, which is not what we want.

So where do I find all these podcasts? Glad you asked. ^_^

At the bottom of your iTunes store page, change your store location to “日本” (it’s at the bottom of the page of countries – look for the Japanese flag).

Once you’re in the Japanese iTunes store, scroll down to the bottom right of the page and you’ll see a Podcasts list – click “View All” to see a whole range of choices.

They’re all free, so go ahead and preview a few and then subscribe/download a few that you really like.

Music

Japanese music is a little harder to get your hands on but not impossible.

You’ll need a Japanese iTunes gift card to be able to download any songs and you can only get those in Japan or at certain sites like JList, who sell Japanese products to the world.

As you probably don’t know any Japanese band names yet, just click around the iTunes store and you can listen to a preview of anything you want.

Make a note of the singer or band name and head over to YouTube to find their promo or concert videos, which you can then listen to as much as you want before making a purchase.

Radio, TV and More

There’s an awesome mp3 listing of English and Japanese novels and fairytales read by native Japanese over at how-to-learn-any-language.com

These are read in a more formal way so they won’t be anything like what you hear on the TBS comedy show I mentioned above but they’re fun to try and the wider range of audio you listen to the better you’ll get.

Other options are Japanese radio shows, which you can find via the “Radio” section of iTunes under “World” or “International” or just search Google.

Also check out Keyhole TV for live streaming of many Japanese TV stations. Although the quality is not good, I find listening to all the variety shows and the ads is heaps of fun.

There’s also Ustream, JustinTV and much more. Google is your friend ^_^

Have Fun

Good luck and listen to as much as you can and keep it fun.

You’ll find over the first couple of weeks that you start picking up lots of new words and that’s when you know you’re making progress even if it is just small steps to start with.

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It doesn’t happen every week or even every month but lack of motivation hits us all at some point.

However, it’s the people who push through that wall and continue their studies that will eventually become a Japanese ninja. ^_^

My favourite thought when studying Japanese seems all too hard is that even the dumbest, most stupid person in Japan knows how to read, write and speak Japanese to a higher level then you are now.

So while you’re thinking that it’s all impossible – it isn’t – there are 125 million Japanese (give or take few) to prove you wrong. They all read, write and speak Japanese to one degree or another and if they can, then so can you.

BTW I don’t like to, and never have, called anyone stupid or dumb but I think you get my point…..anyone (yes, you) is capable of learning Japanese. ^_^

Good luck!

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What is a tense? Verb tenses are used to express time. Things can happen now, in the future or in the past and the tenses show the time of a verb’s action or being.

Below are a few simple examples in English.

On top of describing the past and present, we also need to know how to say whether the action is in the positive (also known as affirmative) or negative.

I’ll use drinking to describe the various tenses so make sure you’re over 21 before reading on ^_^

Present Tense

Affirmative: He drinks.
Negative: He does not drink.

Past Tense

Affirmative: He drank.
Negative: He did not drink.

That’s tenses in a nutshell….well in English anyway……but that’s not what you’re here for is it? You want it in Japanese! Yes? はい! Okay so here we go….

In Japanese there are only four main ways to construct a verb. We’ll look at the most basic “to be” in the examples below.

The では in these examples is pronounced “de-wa” not “de-ha”. The use of the “wa” particle can be seen in such common words and phrases as konnichi wa (こんにちは), konban wa (こんばんは) and watashi wa (わたしは).

Let’s go through some examples using my favourite pet – ねこ (ne-ko = cat).

Using the tense table above we can construct simple statements just by adding the appropriate ending to our noun, cat (ねこ).

To say “It is…” we simply add です after the noun to get – ねこ です (It is a cat). To make that statement in the past tense positive, we simple change です (de-su) to でした (de-shi-ta). ねこ です (It is a cat) becomes ねこ でした (It was a cat).

From previous articles, you may have remember that Japanese has no distinction between singular and plural so both of the sentences could also mean “They are cats” and “They were cats”.

Switching to the negative, ねこ です (It is a cat) becomes ねこ では ありません (It isn’t a cat) and ねこ でした (It was a cat) becomes ねこ では ありません でした (it wasn’t a cat).

Have a go a constructing your own phrases with words such as いぬ (dog), うま (horse) or いえ (house).

There’s plenty more on verbs including -masu and -te verbal forms but we’ll leave that for another day.

Any questions please leave a comment.

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The English version is around but keeps getting removed from YouTube so here’s the link but it may end up breaking.

This is in Japanese but the infographic style means that you’ll probably get the drift of most of it plus it’s a good chance to practice your listening comprehension! ^_^

Japan – The Strange Country

From the designer: “This is my final thesis project. I created info-graphic, motion piece. My objective is to make Japanese people to think about that everything happening here in Japan, isn’t that normal. So I created this video from foreigner’s point of view, rather than Japanese people’s point of view.”

Enjoy!

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Just imagine yourself in a seafood restaurant somewhere deep in Hokkaido and not knowing the right word to say. Sure, yeh, I liked the raw sea cucumber and eel – bring me another serving! ^_^

Anyway it’s all good, the sea cucumber is a distant memory – the sake cured that – and now it’s time to make sure we get these right.

Like (すき)

The Japanese word for like is 好き (すき). While it’s written as suki, the pronunciation is closer to the English word “ski”.

The す (su) sound gets shortened to “s” as it commonly does in desu (です) and many other Japanese words.

To say “I like…something”, you simply use the subject particle が after the item or person that is liked.

In the examples below you see たまご (egg) and いぬ (dog) followed by が. Remember that いぬ can mean dog or dogs (and the same for egg) – Japanese has no plurals.

Examples

わたしはたまごがすきです
I like eggs

わたしはいぬがすきです
I like dogs

Other variations on the “like” theme are as follows:

To say that you “really” like something or someone, it’s simply a matter of placing the word だい, which means big, in front of すき to give us “big like”.

• だいすき (大好き) – really like or love
• いちばん – favourite, number one

Examples

わたしはねこがだいすきです
I really like/love cats

If you were asked what your favourite fruit was you might answer:

メロンがいちばんすきです
I like melon the best

If you’re wanting to hook up with your hot new Japanese girlfriend/boyfriend this phrase might be useful if all goes to plan ^_^

わたしはあなたがだいすきです
I like you a lot

Dislike (きらい)

Dislike in Japanese is 嫌い (きらい). The first part “ki” (き) is a short and sharp sound followed by “rai” (らい), which has that tricky Japanese “r” sound – a cross between r and l.

To keep things simple, I’ll repeat what I used above for “like” and make the changes (marked in bold) for “dislike”.

Examples

わたしはたまごがきらいです
I dislike/don’t like eggs

わたしはいぬがきらいです
I dislike/don’t like dogs

A more harsh variation on the “dislike” theme is:

• だいきらい – really dislike or hate

Examples

わたしはねこがだいきらいです
I really dislike/hate cats

And if hooking up with your hot new Japanese girlfriend/boyfriend doesn’t go to plan…..

わたしはあなたがだいきらいです
I dislike you a lot eg get lost loser!! ^_^

Word Table

And finally, just for kicks, here’s a list of vegetables that you can put to good use in practising your dislike phrases… ^_^

• やさい (vegetables)
• なす(eggplant)
• にんじん (carrots)
• たまねぎ (onion)
• ほうれんそう (spinach)
• もやし (bean sprouts)

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In Japan, like the rest of the world, it’s not okay to run around asking every one about their age, however given the Japanese predilection for being respectful to their elders, you’ll find that they may ask your age so they can address you properly.

I’ve collected a few sentences below that you can use in these situations plus a table of example ages.

In English, you simply add the phrase “year old or years old” to your numerical age and that’s all there is to it.

In Japanese, it works in much the same way, except (and there is always an exception, isn’t there??) for a few changes to some numbers. Remember that さい (sa-i) means “years old” in Japanese and the counter for years-old is 才.

Our first exception starts with 1-year-old, which is written as いっさい (i-s-sa-i) rather than いちさい (i-chi-sa-i) as you might expect as いち is the Japanese word for the the number one.

The phrase for 8-years-old also breaks the pattern as it is pronounced はっさい (ha-s-sai) rather than the expected はちさい (hachi-sai) – はちさい being the Japanese word for eight.

For those of you who are very new to Japanese, you’ll want to make a special note of the small tsu (っ), which functions as consonant doubler and the small yu (ゅ). Read more about how they work here.

Between 11 and 19, you’ll need to add the relevant number from the table below to the end of the word for ten, which is じゅう. So sixteen (16) becomes じゅう (ju-u) plus ろくさい (ro-ku-sa-i) to get じゅうろくさい.

The same patterns repeat the higher you get.

How do you think 41 would be pronounced? Let’s break it down.

41 is made up of よん (4) and じゅう (10) to give us よんじゅう (40) and then add on いっさい (1-year-old) to get よんじゅういっさい (yon-juu-is-sai)

Why not try a few for yourself now. 56? 72? 99?

Whoops almost forgot to mention 20-years-old. The Japanese celebrate this age with a holiday as it is said to be the “Coming of Age”, which is called はたち (hi-ta-chi) and as such the age of 20 is often referred to simply as はたち (ha-ta-chi) – there’s no さい (sa-i) at the end.

So can I just use にじゅっさい (ni-ju-s-sa-i) to say 20-years-old? Yes, you can. ^_^

Examples

Age Sentences

E: How old are you?
J: 何歳ですか?
H: なんさいですか？

E: I am 17-years-old.
J: 私は十七才です。
H: わたしはじゅうななさいです。

E: How old is your daughter?
J: 何歳の娘さんですか？
H: なんさいのむすめさんですか？

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