Japanese Professor

Japanese Words for Food covers common food items in western and Japanese cuisine, including ingredients, dishes, drinks, and snacks.

The next couple vocab lists will be countries, colors, and school subjects.

Beginning Vocabulary: Adjectives is a list of useful adjectives for beginners, organized by topic, with notes on usage. Several more specific adjective vocab pages coming up:

• Colors
• Likes and Dislikes
• Comparisons

Next in the early beginning lessons revisions, The Structure of a Japanese Sentence has finally received some editing. No major changes this time, just a few things fixed here and there.

“Politeness and Formality” and “Pitch Accent and Vowel Devoicing” are the only remaining intro lessons that still need some work. The lessons on expressions might see some changes as well.

As for new content, adjectives are coming up next, as well as a couple additional lessons in the “Wa and Desu” section of the Beginning Lessons.

Beginning Vocabulary: Classroom Objects is the first vocab-specific page in the Beginning Lessons. For a full listing of all vocab-related pages, see Basic Japanese Vocabulary.

Telling Time is the second lesson in the numbers series of Beginning Lessons, which started with Counting in Japanese. This lesson covers the pronunciations of time in hours and minutes, intervals of time (from X to Y) as well as the difference between time of day and durations of time (-ji vs -jikan).

I’ve also been working on the site organization, adding “about” pages to the Beginning Lessons and creating separate pages for different categories in the Links section. Both these and the reference pages are still very much unfinished, and will be expanded over time.

In other news, I’m thinking of starting on the first Kanji lessons in the near future, since I now have two lessons with the corresponding Kanji lessons missing. These first couple lessons won’t get much into the more difficult aspects of Kanji, but will mainly be to introduce about 25 characters for numbers, time, and dates, an easy addition to a beginner’s writing.

I spent some time fixing up Hiragana and the Japanese Sound System, and to a lesser extent Hiragana and the Japanese Sound System, Part 2. The basic organization is the same, but the guide should now be a bit more clear and easy to read.

Having gone through a couple of name changes but not a change in content, Introduction to the Japanese Language has been revised and slightly expanded.

This page covers background information for beginning Japanese learners, and should also be an enjoyable read for those who’ve been at it for a while.

Topics covered:

• Introduction to the language of Japan and the people who speak it
• How Japanese is not related to any know language
• Dialects of Japanese, including Ryukuan and the standard language
• My answer to the question: “Is Japanese a Hard Language?”

The first number related lesson, Counting in Japanese, covers Japanese numbers up to 1000. It also discusses the differences between yon/shi for 4, nana/shichi for 7, and kyuu/ku for 9, and introduces the counters ban and banme.

Subsequent lessons will cover larger numbers, the hitotsu-futatsu-mittsu system, time, dates, counters, and arithmetic in Japanese.