Facebook has grown at a tremendous rate in Japan over the past four years, jumping from just over 200,000 users in 2008 to more than 6 million by the end of 2011. In the process, Japan has generated one of the social network's highest annual growth rates of 254 percent, second only to Brazil.

The translation of the site into Japanese gives non-native speakers a nice glimpse at how the language works; the online space requires adaptations of existing language patterns to fit the new areas of social interaction, and it is a great place to expose yourself to the language.

As you can probably imagine, the site is rife with loanwords. You can komento (コメント, comment) on friends' photos and status updates and shea (シェア, share) both as well depending on the puraibashī settei (プライバシー設定, privacy settings) of the user. Messēji (メッセージ, message), arubamu (アルバム, album), ibento (イベント, event), and grūpu (グループ, group) are also pretty self-explanatory direct translations from the English site. While these words may seem simple, by changing your Facebook language to Japanese, you'll increase your exposure to these katakana words and soon enough they'll look like actual gestalt rather than sets of phonetic characters that you have to sound out every time you read them.