JapanesePod101.com Blog

At this time of year, there are plenty of reasons to celebrate: 12 days of Christmas, 8 days of Chanukah, 7 days of Kwanzaa, and a partridge in a pear tree. But in all this merrymaking, you may have overlooked one important cause for celebration:

赤道祭（sekidōsai: ceremony to celebrate crossing the equator)
     red + road + festival

The Equator Is the Red Road?! …

As it turns out, an equatorial crossing is exactly what I celebrated this week. Somewhere over the Pacific, as others slept, I hooted and hollered as we crossed from winter into summer en route to New Zealand. I also celebrated the idea of seeing water swirl down the drain in the opposite direction.

OK, I haven’t actually left yet, but in my mind, I’m there! And by the time you read this, I will indeed be Down Under.
Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from everyone here at JapanesePod101.com! We’re grateful to have listeners just like you, and we’re eagerly waiting for the upcoming year to learn Japanese together!

And when the New Year comes around, be sure to make a resolution to study Japanese with JapanesePod101.com!

Have a healthy and happy holiday season.

From Peter, Naomi, Natsuko, Sakura and the whole JapanesePod101.com team!

I feel that I’ve overloaded recent blogs, making us all work way too hard. There’s been too much consideration of fine distinctions between similar kanji, too many examples, too many links to click, and too much to read.

So it’s time for an extended vacation from all that hard work—from all that thinking. (It sometimes seems as though we’re never allowed to give our brains a rest, doesn’t it? So much to stuff in there and keep straight.)

I’ve decided that, over the next month or so, I’ll return to the thing that inspires me most about kanji—cool compounds. In each blog, I’ll present some great compounds, grouping them according to a theme (just to provide a reassuring sense of order) and not saying a lot more about them. OK, there’s my cue to stop talking and let you enjoy some combinations that sparkle, sizzle, and inspire with their rightness! Read the rest of this entry »

Picture this. You’re out holiday shopping. You see a sign for 10% OFF. You feel like you’re getting a really good deal, so you rush into the store and make your purchase. You’re a happy customer.

2 days later…

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Sound familiar?

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Team JapanesePod101.com

I love the yomi arawa. It rolls off the tongue. And yet the sequence of sounds is also tough to remember—so much so that when I first learned arawa(seru) as the kun-yomi of 表, I had to associate it with a mnemonic: Ottawa. Strangely, those words sound similar—or they do when I pronounce them!

Last week we found that 露 can have the yomi of arawa, in which case it means “exposed, scanty, bare, unconcealed, naked.”

In a tucked-away corner of an August blog, we looked at three other kanji with the kun-yomi of arawa and with similar meanings. So here’s what we now have altogether:
Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, we came to know 露 (RO, RŌ, tsuyu) as “dew.” So when I saw 露 in the following compound, my mind naturally turned to “dew”:

流露

After all, 流 (RYŪ, naga(reru)) means “to flow,” and dew could easily flow. But in this case, 露 means “to expose”! Here’s the word again:

流露 (ryūro: to disclose, reveal, express)     to flow + to expose

In fact, 露 often conveys a sense of exposure. That was actually our first taste of this kanji two weeks ago, when I introduced a compound about introductions:

披露 (hirō: announcement, introduction)     to reveal + to expose

We also knew 露 as “to expose” back in March, when we considered this expression:

秘密を暴露する (himitsu o bakuro suru: to betray a secret)
     to keep secret + secret + to expose + to expose

Even as early as February, we had a passing acquaintance with 露 as “to expose” in this phrase: Read the rest of this entry »

What they really want for the Holidays.

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