Mixi – Japan's largest online community

Japanese 101

This little toolkit should help your Japanese, especially when using Mixi.

I’ll be adding to this as I go and am happy to help answer any questions you may have about Japanese, Japan or using Mixi.

Japanese primer

• Nihongo in a nutshell
• What the….? There are like 3 different alphabets to learn!

Tools for translating to and from Japanese <-> English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, etc

• Rikaichan
• Google Translation Service
• Goo (Japanese)

Common phrases

• Greetings
• Thanks
• Sorry
• Dating pt.1 – Let’s drink some tea together
• Dating pt.2 – Have my baby

Word lists

• Country names
• Computer terminology

Slang / jive talking

• What you won’t find in the dictionaries
• I don’t understand those young people and their InterPod 2.0’s full of Hippity-Hop….

Reading & writing Japanese

• Roomaji – like English
• Katakana – sounds like English
• Hiragana – sometimes sounds like English
• Kanji – or “How I learned to Love the Online Translation Tools!”

I’m sure there’s some topics I haven’t covered, but Japanese as a language is so huge.

Please send me any requests to cover topics, questions or choc-chip cookies using the contact form.