Pop Culture Studies

In this series we will introduce some basic building blocks of Japanese that are integral to getting your foot in the door through examples taken from popular media.

The Mighty は Particle

I would like to start off this series of articles by introducing the basic idea behind it and by providing

Getting Somewhere: You Need に

With the first article in this series that introduced は and its brother が and so in this article we’re

The What & the Way: を and で

In the last segment we covered に, which guides indirect objects towards verbs and indicates some kind of directionality. In

Putting it Together to Pull it Apart: Dissecting Japanese Sentences

I make the majority of my living from translation work, and a lot of the translation work I do is

This & That

Being able to say “this” or “that” is pretty key in Japanese, especially when you don’t know the words for

He Said/She Said: Speaking Of & Quoting

“That’s what he said,” she said. While the structure of this sentence would appear a little different in Japanese, a