100 Japanese Things

• want to tighten your Japanese?
• learning from real Japanese stuff?
• And you’re maybe not particularly into anime (not that there’s anything wrong with that)?

Welcome home.

Here’s the deal. I am (soon to be ‘we are’) just like you, at least regarding the above.

I moved to Japan without knowing a lick of Japanese. And I just didn’t know how to find the good Japanese stuff. I’d walk into stores and see lots of… things.

Magazines, books, DVDs, etc. some that looked cool. But not, you know, speaking Japanese made it hard to know what the hell to buy (rent, borrow,etc.).

The information on the internet skewed toward anime and martial arts, and those are both cool things, but I just happened to not be too into them at the time. And my Japanese friends would sometimes recommend me things that seemed way beyond my level or unapproachable, either just way too hard or hard to get.

So here we’ll review 100 Japanese things (for starters), from the point of a Japanese learner. How’s it work? We’ll tell you:

• what the thing is
• where you can get it
• what kind of Japanese you might learn from it
• a phrase from it that you can use right away

We’ll make no claims to be critics or Japanese experts, just people sharing 100 Japanese things. Here we go.

(I’m Saleem, by the way. I sometimes live over at kidethnic.com )

BONUS: You can also send us pictures of signs that you see around town and don’t understand.  Check out The Japanese Sign Project .