After World War II, Japan spent decades propelling itself to the summit of economic and technological achievement – for what, demands writer and psychiatrist Otohiko Kaga. Approximately 30,000 ...

Good news for Japanese learners. Kadokawa Corporation has published three new books about the Japanese language. The three books are part of the のびーる国語 nobiru kokugo (stretch your Japanese language ...

The Feb. 18 Kanji Clinic article, "A rainbow of kanji brightens Japan's palette of colors," was very interesting and delightful news. As a former teacher in Japan, I used to struggle with getting my ...

Words and phrases in katakana may appear to be easily recognizable to non-native speakers of Japanese, but they are often fiendishly difficult. This generally comes as a surprise to Japanese, who ...

Katakana too is a phonetic alphabet. It represents the same set of 46 basic sounds but is used for different purposes, such as writing foreign words, making words stand out (in the way we would use ...

Editorial Note: Forbes Advisor may earn a commission on sales made from partner links on this page, but that doesn't affect our editors' opinions or evaluations. Learning the Japanese language is not ...

The Japanese language has three types of characters: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic symbols, each representing one syllable while Kanji is ideogram, each stand for ...

In this photo from the German Olympic soccer team's official Instagram account, players are seen traveling while wearing polo shirts with "Germany" written in Japanese katakana phonetic characters.