Gakuranman.com – illuminating Japan

A recent teaming-up with Wonky Tofugu saw Koichi and I giving a special Edufire Superpass class on bizarre Katakana words in Japanese! It was such a success that we felt it wrong to deprive everyone who missed out, so here it is, in a special 2-part blog post split across Tofugu.com and Gakuranman.com!

Welcome to the first in what I hope will become a long-running series on this site – Japanese One Point Lessons! Today’s lesson is an obscure and fairly recent bit of Japanese I discovered on Twitter – the word なう (Nau).

I came across this fantastically hilarious Super Mario World parody today. It’s an original song by Hyadain which I enjoyed so much that I subtitled and turned into a special Gakuranman Japanese lesson for you! Men compete with their heart!

Have you ever wondered how to read the headlines in Japanese newspapers? They’re so chock-a-block full of kanji that it seems like an insurmountable wall to scale. And that’s not to mention the split sentences. What do all those mysterious sentences that end on a particle mean?! Today I take you through some examples.

A recent interview saw me exploring some of the wonders of Kansai-ben with a native speaker. If you’re like me, you might have an interest in this wacky dialect from Southern Japan, so come and learn a few phrases with us!