Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Over the last few decades, the number of Japanese who live in the tri state area have been increasing, reaching almost 70,000, according to the 2004 data of the Consulate of Japan in NY. It has been speculated that the number of the Japanese who are spending their later years in the tri state area, … Read more
As a musical form without the distraction of a melody but a well-defined beat, rap offers an opportunity to explore the rhythmic and musical aspects of a language. An interesting case study is rap in Japanese, which has completely different syntax, vocabulary, accent patterns, and phonemes from English. Several pioneers of Japanese rap initially thought … Read more
One of the most difficult tasks of teaching Japanese to English speakers is the explanation of wa. Linguists are always trying to find systematic or consistent ways of explaining what something means. For those who don’t speak Japanese, wa is a sentence particle that goes on the topic of the sentence, telling someone what is … Read more