What makes a city a city? Is Tokyo a city? We look at some of the varying definitions and what constitutes a city in Japan. It might just surprise you to learn that Tokyo is actually not exactly a city – nor technically not the capital of Japan! Transcript https://nihongoproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/The-Geography-of-Tokyo.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | […]
Author: Faisal
Episode 1: Exploring Manga Studies with Rayne – The 日本語 Project Podcast

With our guest Rayne, we discuss Manga localization. We talk about what exactly is localization, how this process works and how Manga is brought over from Japan into the United States. Transcript https://nihongoproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Episode-1-Exploring-Manga-Studies-with-Rayne.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Episode 0: The Pilot – The日本語 Project Podcast

Welcome to the The日本語 Project Podcast. Podcasts are a great way to delve more deeply into a topic in a more interactive way with the audience. They also provide another type of engagement, away from just strictly text and images. By breaking this traditional blog format, they also enrich context and provide more insights to […]
Getting Started Learning Japanese

Introduction Having an interest in learning the Japanese language is great and all, but how do you ACTUALLY get started? Given the fact that you need to learn Hiragana, Katakana, sentence structure, vocabulary words, kanji and more, it can be a daunting task. This is really a catch 22, if you don’t start somewhere, you […]
Why are There no Spaces in Japanese?

Introduction If you are new to learning Japanese, you may have noticed a curious element to the language itself. There are no spaces. Of course, if you are familiar with other languages such as Chinese or Burmese the lack of spaces between the words would be nothing new. However, for speakers of languages which do […]
The Kana – Building Blocks of Japanese

Hiragana and Katakana can be considered to be the basic building blocks of the Japanese language. While Kanji (Borrowed Chinese characters) does have a huge role in Japanese writing, all of the words that any Kanji character can represent can be shown using Hiragana or Katakana. What’s the difference? Hiragana tends to be used for words […]
How Earthquake Resistant are Buildings in Japan?

Introduction It’s no secret that Japan experiences several noticeable earthquakes every year. On August 19th 2016, an earthquake measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale hit 170 km off the cost of Miyako, a city in Iwate prefecture. It was followed by another 6.0 earthquake on Sunday, which was also then followed by another 6.0 tremor. […]
Welcome to the Nihongo (日本語) Project!

So you’ve decided to learn Japanese? Great! Deciding to learn a new language, or even reactivate a language which you haven’t learned in a while is always a challenge worth doing. Even though it requires a lot of time, dedication and practice, there’s no reason to go at it completely alone. The Nihongo (日本語)Project is […]