Japanese

Debunked: "Crisis = Danger + Opportunity"

crisis

Surely you've heard this one: the Chinese word for "crisis" (危機, weiji in Chinese, kiki in Japanese) is composed of the two characters for "danger" and "opportunity". This reveals the wise Oriental insight that a crisis is an oportunity for progress, an impressive outlook we'd all do well to emulate. Or so we've been told for decades by management gurus, New Age philosphers, generic pundits, and even world leaders.  read more »

A dose of sensibility: Japanese not so difficult

I'll dip again into my bag of old newspaper clippings. This one is from the October 10, 1994 issue of The Japan Times, in the Nihongo and I column: "Language change inevitable", a discussion with Professor Kikuo Nomoto, former director of the National Language Research Institute.  read more »

What's easy about learning Japanese

The last post looked at three items which I would list as the difficulties facing a would-be learner of Japanese. But they're by no means impossible obstacles. And take heart, o student: I can list a lot more than three things that I find make the language easy to learn!  read more »

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