The Japanese names of the planets as well the days of the week are 漢語 kango or words of Chinese origin. Learn how to say the days of the week in Japanese from my previous lesson Dates and Days in Japanese.
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Non-English Katakana Words
In my previous lesson about Katakana, I listed down five situations when Katakana script is used over Hiragana or Kanji. In this post I would like to share some facts about 外来語 gairaigo. Katakana is mainly used when writing loanwords or 外来語 gairaigo like スピーチ (speech)、トマト (tomato) or パーティー (party) in Japanese. All these words are […]
When to use Katakana?
Japanese language has three different scripts – Kanji 漢字, Hiragana ひらがな and Katakana カタカナ. There were no written scripts in Japanese, until Hanzi characters were introduced from China. These Chinese logograms became a part of the Japanese writing system, however words like prepositions, suffixes, prefixes and verb conjugations could not be represented by Kanji. Hence, […]
Japanese Numbers and Counting
The Japanese traditional counting system is also used as a universal counter (josuushi). However, this system is used to count only till 10. The Sino-Japanese counting system is more prevalent and commonly used in everyday context.