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In japan people greet each other based on the relationship. But there are some greeting which are without any relationship and are dependent on situations. Take case of saying, good morning for example. You can say good morning to any person before clock hits time 12 am. This is quite natural in every part of the world. In japan some people say good morning only upto 9am and after that regular greet of ‘good day’ follows. Still there are some folks who follow 12am as pointer to say good morning.

Good morning in Japanese is written as – Ohayou gozaimasu

おはようございます。

In some cases gosaimasu is dropped and people around you will say ohayoo only. Here ohayoo means morning, which is casual usage. This is also acceptable among friends and family but it’s usually not preferred when you’re greeting seniors in house or office. So take care of this note while greeting any senior around you in japan.

In everyday life we talk a lot about time of the day, hours, minutes and weeks, months etc. It’s not very hard to express these time qualifiers in japanese. So in this post we’ll discuss how to express time qualifiers like years, weeks, months and other some other daily usage time qualifiers. Note that we’re not going to discuss how to tell time in japanese in this post. So let’s take a look at the words for timespan in japanese.

• Days 日 (nichi)
• Week 週間 (shūkan)
• Month ヶ月 (kagetsu)
• Year 年 (nen)

It’s very easy to remember months in Japanese if you’ve followed my previous post. Remember the gatsu word at the end which will help you to remember the months and the days of month. Similarly remembering years is also not difficult, keep ‘nen’ word at the end in mind and you’re done. Practice by using some examples related to your daily conversation.

Globalization has lot of impact on japanese culture as well and because of which they do understand roman number representation. So if you come across any japanese and wants to discuss with him some numbers related to object then you can explain the unit in terms of roman numbers. But there are situations where you can explain things better with japanese numbers and put your point across more effectively. You’ll feel much comfortable if you learn numbers in japanese especially when you have something to purchase in restaurant, market or some store. To quickly get started with numbers in japanese, let’s start writing numbers.

• 0 零 rei
• 1 一 ichi
• 2 二 ni
• 3 三 san
• 4 四 yon
• 5 五 go
• 6 六 roku
• 7 七 nana or shichi
• 8 八 hachi
• 9 九 kyu
• 10 十 ju

Note : 4 and 7 are also represented by another word namely, yon and nana respectively. The reason for that is ‘shi’ means ‘death’ in japanese, so people came up with alternate word.

Numbers after 10 are combined with two words – power of ten and the ordered number. For example, 11 is written as ju-ichi whereas 20 is written as ju-ni. Now that you know how to write numbers in japanese, start writing numbers from 1 to 100. You can revise months in japanese exercise to see if it’s easy for you to remember months now.

In earlier posts we discussed about time of the day and days of the week in japanese. I’m sure you’re now interested in knowing how to write months in japanese. You’ll notice that in japanese, there is no special word for months. These months are named as per counter value 1 to 12 which makes it easy for you to write and remember the names of month. You need to add the suffix – gatsu to ordinal number and you’ll get name of the month. Easy isn’t it ? Yes.

• January 1月 (ichigatsu)
• February 2月 (nigatsu)
• March 3月 (sangatsu)
• April 4月 (shigatsu)
• May 5月 (gogatsu)
• June 6月 (rokugatsu)
• July 7月 (shichigatsu)
• August 8月 (hachigatsu)
• September 9月 (kugatsu)
• October 10月 (jūgatsu)
• November 11月 (jūichigatsu)
• December 12２月 (jūnigatsu)

So you see how easy it is to write and remember the months in japanese ? You can start practicing by writing the months in your sentence to see if you can remember the month names. In order to remember numbers effectively, you need to learn how to remember 1-12 number effectively in japanese. Once you learn this then calling any name in japanese is very easy.

Greeks and Hindus named days of the week based on the planet and the stars around us. For example, sunday – which is related to the closest star to the earth and rest of the days also follow similar pattern based on the old names of the planets in this solar system. In japanese you’ll notice that every day ends with -’yobi’ word. Here yobi means day and the prefix will then mean the name of the day. So let’s see what words are there for days of the week.

• Sunday 日曜日 (nichiyōbi)
• Monday 月曜日 (getsuyōbi)
• Tuesday 火曜日 (kayōbi)
• Wednesday 水曜日 (suiyōbi)
• Thursday 木曜日 (mokuyōbi)
• Friday 金曜日 (kin’yōbi)
• Saturday 土曜日 (doyōbi)

Nichiyobi means sunday and the word is constructed ‘nichi’ means sun and ‘yobi’ stands for the ‘day’. You can also figure out the rest of the words like this way. Once you gured it out how to write days of the week, try making few japanese sentences using these words.