Japanese language & culture blog

Hiragana (平仮名) and Katakana (片仮名) are the two Japanese syllabaries collectively called kana. A syllabary is a set of symbols representing syllables, however, this isn’t entirely true in this case. Japanese language (as well as kana, for that matter) is based on morae (sg. mora)—units of sound used in phonology.

Every word in Japanese is written with the same number of kana characters as there are morae in the word in question, yet it doesn’t necessary have the same number of syllables. For example, the words Tōkyō (to-o-kyo-o, とうきょう), Ōsaka (o-o-sa-ka, おおさか), and Nagasaki (na-ga-sa-ki,ながさき) all have four moraeand are written with four kana characters, yet they have two, three, and four syllables respectively. It is  crucial to understand this difference, the…
Read more » Japanese scripts: Kana (+ cheat sheet)

Japanese language has one of the most complex writing systems in the world; not only does it use thousands of Chinese characters, but it’s also the only language where four different scripts can appear together in the same sentence. In this series, I’m going to explain the difference between these scripts, why and how they should be used, and the best way and order in which to learn them.

Rōmaji (ローマ字), commonly known as latin alphabet outside of Japan, is never used by native Japanese speakers to write full sentences, yet it’s widely used all over Japanese media. The Latin script has a modern, in vibe to it…
Read more » Japanese scripts: Romaji

I am honored to have been given the opportunity to host May 2010 Japan Blog Matsuri, and amazed by the number and quality of this month’s entries. The global theme was How-tos and there are few subjects that weren’t touched in the following articles. Please read on, and you’ll certainly learn something new and useful.

How to split a bamboo

A nata (なた, 鉈) is a special implement used to split bamboo. The blade is thicker on the back side and tapers down to the sharp edge. The thicker end serves to help separate the bamboo when it starts…
Read more » How to Japan

NihongoUp 1.3.0 is finally here and besides bugfixes it also brings a long awaited JLPT 2 kanji mode! As always: Most of the updates are based on your suggestions, so please continue leaving feedback at the NihongoUp feedback page

It is a well known fact that our industry leading educational game NihongoUp provides Japanese students with the fastest and easiest way of learning hiragana and katakana. Today we would like to introduce a revolutionary addition to our application’s feature set which will allow you to learn and type kanji up to 1410% faster than ever before.

With the release of NihongoUp 1.4.10, we are adding native support for the latest fruit of Google’s free-wheeling research culture—the new Japanese Drum Keyboard. The keyboard, a product of Google…
Read more » Learn and write kanji faster than ever before!

After a long time, a new NihongoUp update is finally here. Some of the most notable improvements include a reversed kanji mode (see Settings menu) and support for game window resizing & maximizing which is especially useful for netbook users and owners of huge LCDs, willing to play with a wireless keyboard, sitting on a couch, like myself ^^ Here’s a detailed changelog:

• Reverse kanji mode
• The game progress bar is now better visible
• You can now resize & maximize the game window
• The last correct answer is now shown on game over
• No more duplicate answers
• The game is now paused with a right-click
• Many bug fixes

Some of the features I wanted to include in this update had…
Read more » Game update: NihongoUp 1.2.8

Winter is not just about holidays, but also about recapitulations of the year’s achievements and mishaps, as well as announcement of words & kanjis of the year. The kanji of the year (今年の漢字, Kotoshi no Kanji) is chosen by the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society through a national ballot in Japan. Since 1995, each year, one character representing the events of that year is announced in a ceremony on December 12 (Kanji Day) at Kiyomizu Temple. This year’s kanji is 新 (shin, new) and is supposed to illustrate the win of the Democratic Party in Japan’s elections after almost 54 years of unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party…
Read more » And the kanji of the year is...

Yeah, it’s already been a week since the app was released, but because of the preparations for the the JLPT I couldn’t find the time to write an official announcement till now. NihongoUp for iPhone was finally approved by Apple and is now available on the App Store! This means that you are no longer tied to you computer and can continue playing studying in public transport, while rock climbing, or anywhere else where carrying even the smallest of notebooks would turn out to be impractical.

The initial impressions from the early buyers were very positive and I hope that you’ll like it…
Read more » NihongoUp for iPhone on the App Store

When a student is taught kanji, one of the first thing that is explained to him is the concept of stroke order—the one and only correct way of writing kanji characters. Unfortunately, the reason behind it as well as the main rules are often left undiscussed. Most students are left wondering about why they are supposed to learn one more characteristic for each of the already complicated character, and some of them decide not to follow any of the well established rules at all. In this article I’ll try to explain why it generally is important to use correct stroke order and what are the basic rules that should cover the majority of the kanji characters.

Why is kanji stroke order important?

First

A new update is here, bringing  some long awaited features, as well as many bug fixes and UI improvements. Here’s the full changelog:

• JLPT 1 Vocabulary mode
• Vocabulary answers can now use kanji instead of kana (see Settings)
• Kana modes scoring/difficulty algorithm was changed
• The correct answer is shown when the balloons fall out of the screen
• The correct answer is now displayed 2x longer than before
• “Continue” button renamed to “Continue Trial”
• Music is now muted in the pause menu
• Several new particle sentences
• Many bug fixes

As always, I would like to remind that you are welcome to submit your suggestions and bug reports at the NihongoUp feedback page