Japanese vocabulary

Want to learn Japanese but don't know where to start or how to begin?

Get your learning process moving with this series of posts by resident blogger Michael Cooper. He has concisely put together an excellent Japanese primer...

1. The Basics of Japanese

2. The Basics of Japanese Grammar

3. The Basics of Japanese Pronunciation

Rocket Japanese Premium is an audio language course from the fine folks at Rocket Languages for individuals learning Japanese. If you're reading this, you're probably considering the idea of purchasing this product, so this review will try to help you decide if this language course is right for you.

Transparent Language carries audio courses for a wide array of target languages, including Japanese. Their Everywhere line of audio courses are fantastic in that they are relatively inexpensive and offer plenty of material for you to start developing your listening & speaking skills right away. The Everywhere Japanese audio course is well designed to get busy people speaking and understanding Japanese very quickly. I recommend converting these CD audio files to mp3 format and downloading them onto your iPod or mp3 player so you can listen to them throughout the day whenever you have some time.

After reading my previous blogs in this series, you’ve got a feeling for some basic Japanese.

Maybe you’re even experimenting with sentences. This next post is intended to fill in some of the blanks that were necessarily left out for simplicity’s sake. After all, Japanese is still a fairly complicated language and there are a lot of things to cover. While I haven’t been able to cover all of them, this next section should tie a few concepts together and help you along in your study.

First, we’ll go over some vocab...

Japanese vocabulary is not particularly hard to learn.

The steadily increasing exposure to Western culture after the Second World War has resulted in a large vocabulary of borrowed words, albeit in a heavily Japanized form. The native Japanese vocabulary isn’t particularly difficult, especially once you get used to certain sentence structures. For questions, of course, you can use a sort of template to make sentences using different vocabulary...

When asked to name the most difficult languages to learn, most people would rank Japanese pretty high on that list. On the surface it seems to be an intimidating language, what with its strange kanji characters, quick mode of speech, and varying levels of “politeness.” What a lot of people don’t realize is that basic Japanese is actually relatively easy, and for at least three reasons...