For Paul Dargan's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
This year's kanji of the year is "令," but writer Paul Dargan posits a guess as to what the kanji of the decade might be while looking back on the annual tradition and what the top picks say about the state of the country.
Both "mono" and "koto" mean "thing" in Japanese, but they're used in different ways. And the thing is, nuance matters.
If you ever want to take a break from grammar and reading when studying Japanese, dive into the world of "giongo" and "gitaigo."
Any great chef can whip up an omelet. But each has their own style — the herb-rich French omelet, the albumin-heavy American omelet, the sweet Japanese tamagoyaki, the list goes on — but either way, you can expect to be served up something tasty. That ...
Floating around the murky regions of digitized Unicode values are anywhere between 60 and 100 yūrei-moji — literally, "ghost characters" — haunting the Japanese kanji lexicon.
