Hi, my name is Tae Kim. I’m the author of the Japanese guide to Japanese grammar.
This blog originally used to be at nihongo.3yen.com and I moved the content to my own blog (you’re looking at it right now). The original blog was for people learning Japanese but I have a bit more flexibility now and will write my thoughts on learning Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The focus will still be on useful information for those learning Japanese while posts about Chinese and Korean will be more from a learner’s point of view since that’s what I am. (Not to say that I’m not still learning Japanese.)
For many very good reasons that I won’t go into here, I do not and never will use romaji. So if you are completely new to the Japanese, I suggest you learn Hiragana and Katakana at the following pages:
If you need help reading the Kanji, I recommend using a tool like rikaichan. If you need help reading the Hanzi, perapera-kun is a similar tool for Chinese. You can see a list of such tools under “Free Learning Tools” on my Links page.
Here is the feed for this blog to save you from having to check the site all the time.
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/blog/feed/
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If you have any questions, suggestions for posts, or want to go drinking in the Seattle area, don’t hesitate to email me at taekim.japanese AT gmail.com or you could just post a comment here too.
If you are a tourist, you won’t look up whole...
I hope you’ll continue posting here too, because I personally hate twitters.
I was wondering if you would ever fill out the section on Kansai accents in your guide. I have always been interested in the topic and some disambiguation of some of the issue would be nice.
Thanks a lot,
Yash
Hi,
I have been reading your blog and it is really interesting. I am not learning Japanese but I can speak some French, Catalan and German.
Anyway, I thought you may be interested in the website/application I have launched (www.mylanguagenotebook.com).
My Language Notebook is a program to keep and organise your notes when you are learning a language. If you hear an interesting sentence, you can use the program to make a note of it and also record its audio so that you won’t forget how it sounds. You can then save your sentences as a project so that you can practice them whenever you like.
If you feel that your project would be useful to other people, you can upload it to the web site. You can also download the projects that other people have uploaded and open them in your program. This way, you can learn from other people’s notes and they can learn from yours.
There are already a few decent Japanese projects on the site.
Anyway, I hope you like it,
Jim Morrison
hi there,
congrats for the nice blog, a must for japanese students.
I´d like to introduce you to the project i am working on.
It´s an eLearning community called palabea, focused on language learning.
There you are able to learn almost any language.
we have also many japanese students, teachers and native speakers doing language exchange.
they meet in virtual classrooms, and interact through web 2.0 tools and also in the real world through our offline language exchange feature.
So hope you check it out, feedbacks are always welcome
arigato!
gorka
Hey Tae,
I wish I would have found your Japanese language guide awhile back so I didnt have to spend so much money on all the books i bought. Youe guide is definately the best one out there. You have the perfect flow. You start with the plain style and through in polite later on. For that alone your guide is awesome. I would venture to say you should publish it! Your online guide has top notch (X)HTML and CSS. Keep up the good work brother.
Thanks man!
I’ve been thinking about publishing for a while now. (No offers so far!) And I wanted to offer something even better and more comprehensive than what I have now. (No audio supplement is a big one) Unfortunately, my progress is so slow it may never come to fruition.
Your comment also prompted me to write a post about it!
Tae Kim, I am indebted to you. Your guide to Japanese has been a staple for me for a couple years, and your blog is so interesting! Thanks for making things so easy to understand.
do you have Twitter?
If so, please tell us your username!
anyway, my twitter is twitter.com/hid3ki
Yes, not very interesting I’m afraid but here it is:
http://twitter.com/kimchi314
Hi Tae Kim,
I am very interested with guidetojapanese.org. However I find it hard for me, who has low self discipline to complete it. I tend to stop half way. I think the same problem occurs for other people. So I would like to use your teaching material to create a web app that schedule, encourage, track studies for users.
I have been looking for Japanese grammar site for years. This is the best I have found. I hope I have the honor to create the app with your content.
Please contact me for further discussion.
Warmest Regards,
Roger Lau
@Roger: According to the bottom of the page, the guide is under a BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Love your Guide to Japanese site. I agree with your approach to not use romaji. I admit I am guilty of posting it in my blog, mostly when explaining placenames, famous figures or certain niche terminoloy, but as I think about it more and more, it should not be done, so I think will cut out in future posts and use kana only.
Anyways keep up the good work!
Tae Kim! I’m from Brazil, and I want to translate your Grammar Guide into Portuguese. I’m a translator myself and I can do a very good job! Can you send me an e-mail so that we can talk about it?