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Japanese Language
McDonald's Japan's latest social media ad campaign harkens back to claims that Japan had a pre-Chinese writing system.
The character 町 - pronounced either "chou" or "machi" - is common in Japanese town and neighborhood names. But how do you tell if a given town is a "chou" or a "machi"?
Wanna stress-test your Japanese knowledge? A new social media app for Japanese users dares you to ditch kana by allowing only kanji input, a.k.a. "Pseudo-Chinese."
A store in Kyoto made headlines when it posted a sign in English and Chinese saying it was closed - but, in small print, it welcomed anyone who could read Japanese. It's clever - but is it legal? A lawyer in Japan says: yeah, pretty much.
The people have spoken: The Kanji of the Year for 2024 is, once again, 金 (kin, kane), meaning money or gold - a character reflecting a range of topics from the Olympics to the LDP's embarrassing political slush fund scandal.
Is a word of the year the Word of the Year if most of the people who hear it don't know what it means? That's the debate happening in Japan as the annual U-CAN award goes to a term that doesn't seem to ring many bells.
Trying to keep up with your Japanese slang? Then you'd better learn "kaiwai" - one of the year's most-trending terms.
Some argue that beginners to the Japanese language can skip the writing system and just use romaji. Here's why that's never a good idea.
We typically write them in katakana now - but these Japanese words originally had kanji. How many of these can YOU read?