Te forms are super important in Japanese and I’ve done several videos and blog posts on them. At least a basic understanding of the te form is needed to get any meaningful progress in understanding let alone speaking Japanese well. However much of the focus always seems to be on…
The JLPT is opening up for registrations soon for the December 2021 sitting. You can read about what the JLPT is on their website. The reason I’m talking about it is because it’s a great opportunity to test your Japanese level. Now, the JLPT is not a perfect test. Indeed,…
One thing I wish I had realised earlier is that school and exams are not really that great a measure of your ability in a subject. In the end, tests and exams are an imperfect way to test people. You can be amazing at a subject or area but do…
One of the most common questions that you’ll see about learning Japanese is about what scripts to learn. Do you learn all three at the same time? Should you ignore kanji because we have smartphones? Why bother learning katakana if you can already speak English? As with most questions about…
About half of the students I tutor are doing Japanese in school, generally high school. Despite them learning Japanese for many years, due to how Japanese language programs are structured they have not learnt the basics and therefore struggle with everything to do with Japanese. If they better understood the…
If you are not doing some type of spaced repetition system (SRS) flashcard system to help you memorise words and kanji, you probably should. Language learning does involve learning many words and unless you have some kind of amazing memory, you will need to go over the same words many…
都道府県, read as とどうふけん is a word used to represent the various top level administrative areas of Japan. The Wikipedia article has some great maps, diagrams and more than enough information you’ll ever need to know about this topic. In Japanese the breakdown is as follows: 都：東京都の1、道：北海道の1、府：京都府および大阪府の2、県：それら以外の43. So we see…
Music is an excellent way to learn Japanese. If you find a song you like, you can listen to it endlessly and the constant rehearing of the same words and grammar structures will help you learn them very effectively. In my personal experience, people who are better than your average…
Link to the paper. One issue with Japanese is that because it differs so much from English, you find yourself unable to express even basic phrases correctly. This can lead to reluctance to speak unless you are sure you know what you are saying is right. It stops people attending…
I took Japanese classes in primary school, highschool and did my major in Japanese at university. Would I recommend them? No. Of course the very existence of this website and blog are for promoting my Japanese tutoring services (you can check out my fantastic YouTube videos as well!) so of…