Seven Mistakes Foreigners Make When Speaking Japanese—and How to Fix Them

Master these and you can convince anyone you’re a native Japanese speaker…over the phone anyway.

For anyone who’s studied Japanese, it can be an interesting experience talking with people who are less proficient in the language. Often they’ll ask the question “Isn’t it hard to memorize so many characters just to be able to read and write?”

My usual response: “I wish that were the hardest part of learning Japanese.”

With that in mind, here’s a list of seven Japanese nuances that foreigners frequently get wrong, as chosen by one of the reporters on our Japanese sister site. Keep in mind that these aren’t mistakes that would necessarily prevent you from being understood, but rather mistakes that, if you can fix them, will make you sound more like a native speaker.

1. Differentiating between は (wa) and が (ga)

Non-native speakers often misuse wa (written は and sometimes romanized as ha) and ga. Both are particles, meaning that they come after nouns in a sentence; wa marking the conversational topic of a sentence, and ga marking the grammatical subject.

Full article continued at RocketNews24
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