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Valentine’s day is just few days ahead of us and i’m sure you’re going to greet your friends with ‘happy valentine’s day’ message. In this post i’m going to show you how to write ‘i love you’ and ‘Happy valentine’s day’ in Japanese.

If you want to say ‘i love you’ to someone you love or friend then type – Aishiteru yo (if you’re man) and aishiteru wa -( only said by women).

You can type this like following –

愛してるよ (aishiteru yo)
愛してるわ (aishiteru wa) – only said by women

For those who want to say ‘Happy valentine’s day’ should type the following :

yukai barentaindee dei 幸せなバレンタインデー

For those who are celebrating their valentine’s day with Japanese friends or in japan, don’t forget to have fun and also to learn culture difference by observing people on this day.

If you’re learning Japanese with no mentor or person to help you then chances are there that you’ll hit wall while learning. In such a case it’s hard to find the meaning of any Japanese word online. You can use translation sites as a pointer to get quick solution to this problem. Note that these sites are not accurate and they’re often not supposed to be taken for literal translation because words do have multiple meanings when used in sentence. Following are the list of sites to be used if you’re interested in Japanese translation.

Google Translate

This site not only allows you to translate from multiple language but also allows you to listen to pronunciation. You can also view synonyms as well. I found this site getting more accurate with results these days. Definitely worth to check before moving to any other site. It also allows web page translation, paragraph or word translation.

Nifty Translation

You can use this site to translate web pages, Japanese text snippet or word. This is very easy to use site that gives instant translation.

Woldlingo

Similar to nifty tool but only difference is that you’ll find interface in English language.

Free Translation

This site has english interface and you can use it to translate the Japanese text. It’s free.

If you watch Japanese anime or television shows then you’ll notice that there is smaller kana near kanji words. This smaller kana is known as ‘furigana’ in Japanese. Think of this kana as reading aid for those who can’t read the difficult kanji or for kids who are yet to know about the kanji. Japanese use it to make pronunciation easy for kids and adults, who can’t recognize certain type of kanji. You know how vast collection of kanji word is and knowing that furigana is really helpful for those who can’t pronounce it.

You can find furigana on official Japanese forms in corporate or government office. This is to make form filling easy for those who don’t know how to pronounce kanji and can’t spell it. Some newspapers also use it in classified or other important news where they want larger audience to read the material. If any kanji is uncommon or difficult to read even for adults in that case, furigana is preferred over kanji.

Foreign language students usually find furigana easy to read, so their textbooks contain furigana instead of kanji for simple reading. Also for such students there are furigana version of the textbooks released in the market.

If you read kids toys commercial or books then you’ll find that they use furigana recursively instead of kanji. Kids storybooks, textbooks and comic books also contain furigana instead of kanji. Many weekly comic chapters are written in furigana these days for larger audience.

When you use a map or compass then you make a direction with respect to earth’s axis of rotation. In english these directions are with respect to – north, south, east and west. All the locations on map are with respect to these direction and are also followed in japan as well. Then there are causal way of showing directions like – left, right up and down, front and behind etc. In japanese you can express the same easily but these words will take some time to practice. You’ll also need some writing practice in order to remember those words.

Take a look at some of these words related to directions -

North – kita – 北
South – Minami 南
East – Higashi 東
West – Nishi 西

Now that we know the map directions, let’s take a look at daily usage directions.

Up -Kōryū 交流
Down – Daun ダウン
Inside – Naibu 内部
Outside – Soto 外

Other than these there are some direction specific words we use in conversation. Take a look at these -

Front – Furonto フロント
Behind – Haigo ni 背後に
Left – Hidari 左
Right – Migi 右

It requires a lot of practice to get the timing for using these words. Try making few sentences for these words if you want to remember them for longer.