How to introduce yourself in Japanese? Part 1 Posted by keiko on Feb 1, 2014
“Tell me about yourself.” This is the phrase you might hear quite often at the job interviews. In Japanese, we have a word for “introducing oneself”, which is “Jikoshoukai” (じこしょうかい、自己紹介) 自己(じこ)means “oneself” and 紹介(しょうかい)means “introducing”. If you are introducing yourself in Japanese, these are the useful expressions that you can use. 私の名前は ～です(わたしのなまえは～です。） My name…
The Bean-Throwing Festival Posted by keiko on Jan 28, 2014
Have you heard of Setsubun Festival in Japan? People in Japan celebrate what they call, the Bean-Throwing Festival, Setsubun(せつぶん、節分) on February 3rd every year. Setsubun is rather a Spring festival since this is done the day before the first day of Spring. It is not a national holiday; however, people never forget to celebrate this…
Let’s learn how to read Japanese! Part 4 Posted by keiko on Jan 24, 2014
So far, we have covered Japanese Hiragana’s(ひらがな) in Part 1 through Part 3 of the “Let’s learn how to read Japanese” series. Part 4 will be on Katakana(かたかな). Katakana is another writing system in Japanese. Katakana’s are used to express foreign language words or words that originate from other countries. I will discuss the examples below. Katakana’s…
How to surround yourself with Japanese Posted by keiko on Jan 22, 2014
You are currently living in a country where Japanese is not the main language. Besides learning Japanese by traditional method such as reading text books, how can you effectively expose yourself to Japanese to learn more? In this article, I would like to share with you how you can surround yourself with Japanese when you…
Let’s learn how to read Japanese! Part 3 Posted by keiko on Jan 20, 2014
Hi everyone. The Part 3 of the Hiragana lesson will be on what we call Yo-on(ようおん,拗音) & Sokuon(そくおん、促音). Once you master these two along with the 2 previous lessons (basic hiragana(seion) & dakuon, han-dakuon), you will be reading Japanese hiragana’s in no time. Please don’t think too hard. These are just additional sounds in Japanese…
Let’s cook Zenzai! Japanese Red Bean Soup Posted by keiko on Jan 16, 2014
Have you heard of a Japanese red bean soup called, Zenzai(ぜんざい)? This is one of my favorite dishes to eat during the winter. It is a sweet tasty red bean soup with Mochi(rice cake、もち). It is pretty simple to make this. If you like red beans, you gotta try it! The red beans we use…
Let’s learn how to read Japanese! Part 2 Posted by keiko on Jan 13, 2014
Hi everyone! We covered the basic hiragana(ひらがな) the other day. (You can read about the first lesson on Hiragana from:https://blogs.transparent.com/japanese/lets-learn-how-to-read-japanese/) As you know, there were total 48, well, minus 2 (ゐ & ゑ ) 46 hiragana’s that I introduced. Let’s review them first. Let’s see if you can read the following words: しま いも こころ き…