Kanji, rather infamously, has a lot of characters to learn (or Hanzi, or Hanja, but I'm using Kanji for specifically the Japanese use of it). The sure-fire way is to learn them all, of course; the good news is that you're going to learn what a lot of compound words (jukugo) mean pretty much for free along with those characters. If you want to learn what a lot of kanji mean the proper way, though, there are better places than an online article.

So you've learned standard, formal Japanese from classes or textbooks, and not long after, you've run straight into a brick wall of phrases that weren't in there at all.

Self-study is key if you really want to get ahead in your Japanese language studies. Fortunately, there are a lot of great websites available offering free online study materials that can help keep you motivated. Here’s a run-down of some of the best.

We are in a golden age for Japanese language learners. Apart from all the apps, websites, interactive textbooks, and more that you can use to teach yourself, right now access to Japanese content is unprecedented. There is so much out there it can be hard to know where to get started. In this article, I’ll be offering some tips and introducing some of the best Japanese dramas to help out!

Business language in English is famous for its overly complex jargon which though intended to impress the listener, often leaves people scratching their heads. The situation is similar in Japan, but an interesting point is that many popular Japanese business buzzwords have been adapted from the English language.

There seems to be a general idea that learning the Japanese language is quite difficult. It’s backed up by official sources, too, like the US Government’s Foreign Service Institute’s School of Language studies. The SLS ranks languages by the length of time typically required for native English speaking students to reach “Professional Working Proficiency” in a large number of languages.

In this article we introduce some of the best smartphone apps for studying Japanese vocabulary, grammar, reading, and kanji.

Last time, we started on our trip through the more obscure or unexpected twists and turns of learning Japanese (but not the harder parts; the list of kanji is that way if that’s what you want) with an overview of some abbreviations. This time, we’ll pick up where we left off with one particular example, but we’re also going to be taking a look at bits and pieces of all sorts of other things that wouldn’t fill a full article by themselves.