JapanesePod101.com Blog

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Today we're going to start with dessert—a quiz! Uncharacteristically, the learning portion will come at the end. Below you'll find a game that I had to excise from my forthcoming kanji book, because of space constraints. (Similar exercises remain in the book, but this one got the axe because it was so long.) It seemed like a shame to waste the material, especially after my friend Mayumi-san was nice enough to help me create the game, so I thought I'd present it here. In the sentences below, one kanji appears repeatedly: 覚. This character has quite a few yomi, and the point of the game is to figure out which yomi applies each time. Rewrite the sentences in hiragana or... Show more

Starting Monday, November 10th all lessons three weeks or older will be moved to the Basic subscription section of the site. The first three lessons of every season and every level will remain free forever on the site. What does this mean for you? If you’re an active Basic or Premium member, you will be unaffected. Absolutely nothing will change. Furthermore, long-time listeners enjoying the most recent episodes, you are also unaffected. Lessons less than three weeks old will remain absolutely free on the site and on the feed. In addition, the first three lessons of all levels and all season will still be free on the site for you to study from, so continue to enjoy JapanesePod101.com lessons. Listeners and users focusing on older... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary You may have heard that there's a Japanese town called Obama. Well, it's true! The town is in central Japan, on the island of Honshu, in Fukui Prefecture. To understand the origin of the name Obama, you need to know more about the two characters that form that word: 小浜 (Obama)     small + beach As it turns out, Obama is "small beach," making it one of those wonderful Japanese place names that derive entirely from nature. (We have a bunch of those in English, too, but somehow Pleasant Hill and Pine Valley seem horribly suburban and bland by comparison.) With 小浜, you pronounce the first kanji simply as o. Normally, the second isn't bama but... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Let's start with a quick quiz. We’ve seen that 味 (MI, aji) means "flavor," among other things. Given that, what do you think this compound means? 一味     one + flavor a. the best possible flavor b. unique or peculiar flavor c. gang, clan d. monomaniacal To block the answer from view while you think about it, I'll share something cool I saw in LA recently: The orange thing in the car is the setting sun! You may remember how I said awhile back that accepting my new age was as difficult as looking at the sun? I saw this sunset during an endless traffic jam on my birthday. So I guess I managed to look straight at the sun after all! OK, give... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Today we'll learn how to be pretentious in Japanese. If you've ever watched the show Frasier, you may have heard the character Niles order cappuccino with "just a whisper of cinnamon." And if you saw the movie Sideways, you heard the wine snob protagonist refer to one red wine as having "the faintest soupçon of asparagus and just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese." These characters used an important bit of syntax when they indicated "a touch of" or "a smidge." How important? Well, it's the difference between calling a movie Evil and A Touch of Evil. In Japanese, 味 (MI, aji) enables you to indicate when something has just a hint of this or a touch of that. This kanji... Show more

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, (Formal I know, but "G'Day mates," might be a bit too casual.) Sam (AKA Jkid) here. I have been listening to JapanesePod101 since its debut on the web. Its purpose was simple. To make learning Japanese interesting and fun. As a long time learner of Japanese I was, of course, interested in what it might have had to offer. Since that time I have listened to almost all of the lessons here. At first, that is all I did. However, it didn't take me long to find my way over to the forums and into the comment section of each lesson where I then began to interact regularly with the great community of people that’s been established here. (Although, it should be noted that in the lesson comments I posted as “A... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary It often seems that food is the best entryway into learning Japanese. Without even taking a Japanese class, most of us know words such as sushi, tempura, miso, and so on. Ah, but do you really know all there is to know about miso? Here's the word in the way you already know it: 味噌 (miso: fermented bean paste)     tasty food + boisterous On the Ateji in 味噌 ... 味噌汁 (miso shiru: miso soup)     miso (1st 2 chars.) + soup Because miso is usually white (shiro, 白), I always want to call this miso shiro. (Plus, that rhymes.) Maybe it would help to associate this shiru with the verb "to know" (shi(ru), 知), using the mnemonic,... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary If a man tastes something bitter and then runs away, what do you get? A man in discomfort? A disappointed (that is to say, bitter!) man? No, you get a "sternly handsome" man, whatever that is! 苦味走った (nigamibashitta: sternly handsome)     bitter + taste + to run The first two characters form the word 苦味 (nigami or kumi), meaning "bitterness" or "bitter taste." Meanwhile, 走った (hashitta, voiced here as bashitta) looks like the past tense of the verb 走 (hashi(ru): to run). But actually, 走った functions here as a participle, a verbal adjective describing the implied 男 (otoko: man). That is, he's a man who ran after he ate something bitter. Sounds... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary I recently rented the Japanese movie 茶の味 (Cha no Aji, tea + taste), thinking it might actually be about tea. After all, someone translated the title as The Taste of Tea, so I don't think I was off base in hoping it might be at least partly about Japanese tea. Out of all the uncontrollable passions in my life, tea runs a close second to kanji. If you want to know just how crazy I am about tea, take a look at my tea cabinet. Green teas fill most of the upper shelf, with teabags to their left.Black teas are on the lower right. Decaf teas are on the lower left.There's more at the office. But the sad truth is that the movie wasn't about tea. Not even a little. Well, OK,... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Given the trials and tribulations I described last week, the title of this blog might make you think I'm referring to my mental health. No. I'm doing OK, because the data-recovery crew salvaged almost 100 percent of my data! Yippee! Hurray! And hallelujah! "Putting the Pieces Together" means that today, in the latter half of a two-part review, we'll shift away from last week's focus on individual kanji and will now look at compounds containing those characters. In past blogs, we've spent time discussing all the words you'll encounter in today's quizzes. But of course, kanji being what it is, there's no guarantee that anything has stuck. That's certainly true for me.... Show more