Gakuranman.com – illuminating Japan

It’s been a while since I looked at some interesting Japanese, so “Let’s Nihongo!” it up with a frisky little word I learnt during my intercourse with Japan. Oh yes, be afraid. Here comes a terrible orgy of puns for ‘Aokan’ (青姦), the little-known word for getting busy under the stars.

Hop on over to the Japan Times to read my special feature titled “Mastering the Gentle Art of Arguing in Japanese” – an extension to last month’s Arguing in Japanese article. This one looks more at the sort of expressions you can use in Japanese to help discussions go smoothly!

Philip from Nihongoup recently asked me for an interview as part of his growing collection of knowledge on learning Japanese. I’ve never really written a post about how I got to where I am today with my Japanese, so if you’re interested, head on over to read all about my younger days.

Here are the winners to the review and contest I held recently. Philip has supplied me with two copies of his nifty little flash game that helps you learn Japanese to give away, so without further ado, let me announce the lucky people to win!

NihongoUp is a neat little game that installs quickly and cleanly and offers great benefits to you learning Japanese. With Kana and Kanji practice and even vocabulary drills for up to the highest level of the JLPT, it’s certainly getting itself noticed in the language-learning arena. You can also win a free copy!

Free Japanese resources are plentiful on the internet, but have you ever wondered if you are getting the most out of them? While studying Japanese and working as a translator I’ve found a lot of great tools. So here’s Gakuranman’s top 5 picks for the best online dictionaries for Japanese-English translation!

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?! 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!

Finally! They’re here! MY JLPT level 1 results! (Actually, they were a week ago, but Love Dolls took the limelight). Three months of trepidation. Of nervously waiting by the letterbox and checking every JLPT website for some semblance of news. I kid, right..? And they arrived, in an unceremoniously bent envelope last Friday…