Articles for Learning

Welcome to the this page! This article is on the beastly sonkeigo 尊敬語, Japanese respectful language. Sonkeigo, or keigo, is used when you are speaking with or about someone who is well respected, has your respect, or has a respectful position, such as any member of a royal family, presidents, professors/teachers, or senpai (big brother or sister in a club or company). 

A lot of students at Hills Learning that are learning Japanese have questions on grammar. I found this question in particular to be of significance, and felt that it had been repeated quite a few times. So I decided to write an article on it! What is the difference " miru" and "mirareru"? 「見る」　と　「見られる」 見る？　見られる？ 

What can be the hardest part about learning a language is maintaining fluency. When you're outside of the classroom or the country of your target language or don't have native speakers with whom you can practice, you start getting rusty. However, a way to integrate bits of Japanese into your every day life is through what I like to call 'Nihonglish'. Please read further for more details! What is Nihonglish? The Basics Advanced Grammar   What is Nihonglish? It's a portmanteau ...

What do you do when you're lost in the middle of Tokyo with nothing but an address to guide you towards your location? If you're rushing to your next meeting at the hotel you're staying at, the most obvious choice would be to take a taxi. However, this may be daunting task for some people. Let's practice holding an impromptu one-on-one conversation with a driver and communicating where you want to go.

Feel like you’re in a rut? Tired of always using those same old bland declarative statements of “watashi wa ～ desu” or questions like “o-genki desu ka?” Adding in some conversational filler words is a great way to improve your Japanese and make it sound more natural. Including these words will let you add to the conversation, change topics, or cut to the chase just like the natives. 

When learning Japanese conversation, it’s important not to just learn what you need to say, but also what could possibly be said to you. Memorizing some key phrases that are said in the hotel will not only prepare the Japanese language learner to be able to have a conversation in Japanese, but also help with a basic understanding of Keigo Japanese. 

When learning Japanese conversation, or developing conversational skills in general, it’s important to develop “situational fluency.” Language learners should anticipate common situations they’ll run into, and prepare their language skills to meet the demands of those situations. 

This article is dedicated to teaching some key Japanese conversational phrases while practicing the alphabet Hiragana. By the end of the article you’ll learn how to respond to a typically asked question in Japanese Conversation.

Learning the Japanese language at first might seem exotic. The grammar structure is actually quite different than English, and learning the vocabulary for conversation also might seem like a daunting task. However once a student acquires some basic grammatical patterns the Japanese language can also become familiar, well almost as familiar as Sony!