Fun Friday 09: Why do Japanese People Wear Masks?
Learn Japanese Pod
Alex Brooke
4.8 • 917 Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2018
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the latest Fun Friday podcast Tomo Akiyama is back by popular demand. We mostly talked about various aspects of Japanese culture including the question “Why do Japanese people wear masks?”. This discussion came up through the questions people most commonly ask about Japan on Google. Therefore we took a stab at answering this popular query.
We also talked about how Katakana is used in Japanese and the rules for writing foreign words in this script. We also answered listener questions including how to improver your Japanese listening skills.

The guest on this week’s show is Tomo Akiyama, a corporate communications specialist and linguist. He is a gourmet, advocate of Japan and expert in destroying cultural stereotypes and myths. He’s an absolutely fascinating individual full of mind-blowing facts about the Japanese language and the culture of Japan.
You can follow him on Twitter here @tomoakiyama
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Konichihuah, and welcome to Learn Japanese Pod with me Alex and this is the special fun Friday edition if you don't know what the fun Friday edition is it's where we put away |
| 0:18.0 | our Japanese textbooks and vocabulary lists and just |
| 0:22.3 | Shat about Japan, life the universe and anything that happens to |
| 0:26.2 | float into our heads. |
| 0:27.4 | And today I am joined by the wonderful, the powerful, the amazing Tomo! hey Tomo, thanks for joining us. |
| 0:35.0 | Thank you, thank you for letting me join today. |
| 0:38.0 | And it's great to have you back. |
| 0:39.0 | Now, this podcast came about because we did a Fun Friday. |
| 0:44.6 | How long is it ago now? |
| 0:45.4 | It's like a couple of months now. |
| 0:47.3 | Feels like it's been forever, yeah. |
| 0:49.2 | We've been, both of us have been like super busy |
| 0:51.8 | with other things and I was by the way I just want to say |
| 0:56.4 | Tomo you're a great sport because I was pestering you to do a podcast and we were both kind of busy |
| 1:01.9 | but we made it happen so I'm looking forward to this today and also |
| 1:06.0 | another reason this podcast came around is because I got amazing tweets and email saying |
| 1:12.0 | hey when are you gonna get Tomo are you going to get Tomo back? |
| 1:13.7 | We want to hear Tomo. |
| 1:14.9 | So the last one, we were, well, we were talking about a whole bunch of subjects, |
| 1:20.6 | but if you don't know who Tomo is he's a corporate communication |
| 1:24.1 | specialists and he also has a background in linguistics he's a native speaker of |
| 1:29.3 | Japanese English and umpo de France say well I'm a a friend say well. I'm a native speaker Japanese. I was raised in France. |
... |
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