Japanese dialects vary widely by region, especially in vocabulary, grammar, intonation and pitch accent. Most speakers across mainland Japan can understand Standard Japanese, which is used in education, public life and national media. However, strong regional dialects...

Asia is often referred to as an area with an air of inscrutability, and perhaps one of the foremost reasons for this is its languages. With many intricate characters and myriad meanings gleaned from seemingly cryptic glyphs, the languages of Asia are easily perceived...

There are three different types of Japanese characters. These are called Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. There are several thousand characters in those different character sets combined, and they’re used together in many different ways, often even in the same word… So,...