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東京の旅館に北海道からの旅行客が泊まりました。部屋まで案内すると、客たちは口々に「あぁ、こわい」「こわい、こわい」と言うではありませんか。案内してきた仲居さんは驚いて、慌てて洗面所の鏡をのぞき込みました。しかし、そこに映っていたのは普段と変わらない自分の顔。 Read the rest of this entry »

The Kanji for this week are as follows: (Remember, each compound must use the Kanji in the brackets [ ].)

Kanji Scrabble #11 [本] 気、言、国、人、手、社、生、一、会、道 (Learn How to Play Here)

To start, all you need is a Twitter account and to follow our Twitter account @japanesepod101

(What’s Twitter you ask? Read our guide here.)

Welcome to Forum Spotlight! Here we’ll be introducing interesting and useful posts made by members at our very own JapanesePod101.com Forum. This week’s forum spotlight post is a question asked by watermen about how to go about typing a kanji that you don’t know the pronunciation for. We chose the answer given by Belton for this week’s Forum Spotlight post. If you need help with how to look up kanji , you’ll find some answers here!
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Question：
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How do you type a kanji that you don’t know how to pronounce?

Read the rest of this entry »

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If someone planned to serve you the following, how would you respond?

粗煮 (arani: dish consisting of bony fish parts boiled in soy sauce)
     coarse + to boil

Blech! Not one part of that sounds good to me. Bony fish parts and hot soy sauce do the opposite of whetting my appetite.

I would have guessed that you’d make this dish only if the fridge were barren, save for a few bottled sauces and a moldy onion growing new parts. But it’s entirely possible that 粗煮 is a delicacy! As it turns out, the answer isn’t so clear-cut; see the link for more on that.

Native Takes on the Situation …

From the following definitions of the first kanji, you can certainly see how this could be food of the last resort:

粗 (ara)

1. leftovers (after filleting a fish)
2. rice chaff (i.e., worthless husks of grains)
3. flaw (especially of a person)
4. a prefix meaning “rough; roughly”
5. crude; raw; natural; wild

You get all that just when the yomi is ara. And there are two more yomi. Here’s the full story on this kanji:
Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks for following us on Twitter! We hope you have been enjoying the mini lessons we’ve been updating everyday. Our next theme will be Compound Verbs, or 複合動詞 (fukugō dōshi) in Japanese.

Over the next couple of weeks we will introduce you to a new Compound Verb everyday on Twitter.

So what are Compound Verbs, you ask?

Read the rest of this entry »

「隣の花は赤い」ということわざを知っていますか？　これは、「他人のものは何でも素晴らしく見えて、羨ましく思うこと」です。同じ意味で「隣の芝は青い」ということわざもありますね。

さて、なぜ隣の家に咲いている花は「赤い」のでしょうか？　白や黄色の花だってあるのに、わざわざ「赤」という色を選んでことわざに用いているのには、何か理由があるのでしょうか。 Read the rest of this entry »

The Kanji for this week are as follows: (Remember, each compound must use the Kanji in the brackets [ ].)

Kanji Scrabble #10 [後] 目、日、見、読、手、口、生、一、車、足 (Learn How to Play Here)

To start, all you need is a Twitter account and to follow our Twitter account @japanesepod101

(What’s Twitter you ask? Read our guide here.)

Answers: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Forum Spotlight! Here we’ll be introducing interesting and useful posts made by members at our very own JapanesePod101.com Forum. This week’s forum spotlight post is a question asked by debondtjan about the best way to write out kanji and kana that was answered by Belton.

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Question：
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“For writing the kana/kanji, what would you suggest: a thick pen or a normal pen to practice? The bigger, calligraphic versions of kana & kanji (where they use a thick pen) always look so much better and easier to the eye than the smaller ones.

One problem I currently see in my learning process, is that sometimes small hiragana (on screen) miss some pixels (that you clearly see on bigger hiragana) that aided me in remembering certain hiragana. For example: an arc not completely drawn and looks more like a strike. If someone needs a better example, I’ll try looking for one.” Read the rest of this entry »

I wonder if you know how to say the following things in Japanese:

He’s free with his money.
She has a rough way of talking.
My boss is a slave driver.

No? How have you been getting by so far? Don’t you need the third sentence, in particular?

Two More Terms You Can’t Live Without …

Even though these English sentences seem to have nothing in common, their Japanese translations share some useful vocabulary. All three feature the kanji we’ve been examining for the past two weeks:

荒 (KŌ, ara(i), ara-, a(reru), a(rasu), -a(rashi): rough, crude, natural, wild)

In fact, in every sentence, 荒 shows up in the following word:

荒い (arai: rough, rude, wild)

Furthermore, all the sentences contain a kanji that’s probably familiar to you:

使 (tsuka(u): to use)

But you may not know its suffix form:
Read the rest of this entry »