TOKYO — Have you ever wondered which words are the most common in Japanese? Mark Smith took all the words in a Japanese dictionary, put them through some Internet search engines, and then compared the number of search hits. The results are in his new book: “The Top 500 Japanese Words: Ranked by how often they appear on the Internet.” Many of the resulting words are more common on websites than in conversational speech, and that’s ideal if you want to read Japanese websites. For instance, the first three words are “kensaku 検索” (look up, search), “joho 情報” (news, information, gossip), “saito サイト” (website). The examples are written in Romaji and Japanese script. From the author of “Real Japanese: Learn to speak the same way Japanese kids do!”, who also developed the automated Japanese video-chat website www.blackbeltjapanese.com. Over 100 illustrations by “myoume.” Available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.jp ISBN-13: 978-...
