Daniel Morales
77 episodes listed below
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Everyone learning Japanese needs a senpai - this podcast is your digital senpai. Join Daniel from HowToJapanese.com and guests to learn what strategies have been effective for them as they study, live, and work in Japan and using Japanese.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Close readings of Japanese usage connect vocabulary and grammar to literature, travel, and the texture of everyday life in Japan.
Daniel Morales treats Japanese as something learned through close attention to actual use. How to Japanese Podcast moves from the shades of meaning inside a single expression to the places it appears in social media, business, education, and everyday communication.
Moromoro still feels slippery? Daniel Morales checks how people actually use it so you can, too.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm year-end tour of reading strategies, Murakami projects, language writing, and Japan's New Year shutdown.
How to Japanese turns a planned month off into a year-end look back at Daniel Morales's long-running work with language, reading, and Japan. The episode moves from a 2009 post on skimming and reading strategies into Murakami projects, including the live blog of 1Q84, annual…
A thoughtful look at Japanese grammar, web writing, and the odd usefulness of drinkable mayonnaise.
Episode 59 follows Japanese as a series of choices rather than a set of rules. Through omitted subjects, the difference between dearu and da, and the feel of addressing a reader in spoken forms, Daniel Morales keeps the focus on how grammar changes the effect of a sentence.
A rainy-season Japanese expression opens into usage, pronunciation, tentative etymology, and calendar history.
Episode 64 turns 五月雨式, or samidare-shiki, into a neat language note about rain, rhythm, and older ways of marking time. It moves from a pronunciation puzzle into a tentative look at water-and-drop origins, then settles on the useful image: work that arrives unevenly, stopping…
A practical look at the Japanese signals that bring unfinished business back into conversation.
Episode 54 treats kakunin as more than a vocabulary item, using it to show how Japanese speakers steer a conversation back to something that still needs checking.
A cold Osaka morning leads into a thoughtful shift from collecting Japanese to shaping a voice.
Episode 61 uses a cold February day in Osaka to think through how language learning changes over time. Daniel Morales moves from one-degree weather, humid chill, and indoor jogging at a municipal gym into the collector's instinct that often marks the early years of studying…
A clear grammar walk-through that turns one long Japanese sentence into a usable method.
The episode is strongest as a sentence-diagramming walk-through. It opens with a correction, then takes one long Japanese sentence apart piece by piece, keeping the focus on method instead of abstraction.
A highball campaign becomes a small lesson in how words settle in.
Episode 49 starts with a stray word and turns it into a quiet look at how language settles in memory. It moves from newsletter writing to language recall, then into Suntory's highball campaign, where "the night starts with highballs" feels less like a slogan than a small…
A Murakami detour that turns a moving checklist into a quiet lesson on 見積もり.
A small domestic problem opens the door here: a move on the calendar, a pile of used books, and a New Year promise that barely holds. What follows is a calm drift through Murakami editions, Mercari searches, and the neat pressure of 見積もり, with the practical and the literary kept…
John McWhorter and co-hosts trace English etymology, grammar shifts, and idiom origins episode by episode.
Héctor and Beto dissect Mexican grammar, slang, and news in native-speed Spanish conversations.
Daniel Morales opens Episode 74 of How to Japanese with a 3,000-word newsletter post on jiko, a compound that he says looks like “items,” “matters,” or “facts” in English but behaves differently in Japanese.
Daniel Morales frames episode 65 of How To Japanese around June 2025 heat in Osaka, where June 16th was the first 30-degree day and summer humidity is already affecting books and air conditioning habits.
Daniel Morales opens Episode 53 of How to Japanese in July 2024 with a heatwave update from Kyoto, where he says BitSummit left him close to heat stroke.
Episode 46 of How to Japanese centers on そうこうしているうちに, a phrase the host traces through tweets, Twitter search results, Blue Sky, and Facebook posts in Japanese.
Daniel Morales uses Episode 59 of How to Japanese Podcast to break down Kakuta Mitsuo's Shiawase no Nedan and the grammar point のです through a passage about carrying 2,000 or 3,000 yen in a wallet.
Host Daniel Morales reflects on recent marriage, family visit to Japan, and linguistic discoveries while exploring Osaka's street naming system.
Daniel Morales says his first US JETA Japanese coaching session filled up in less than 24 hours, and he ties that to a broader point about how learners can find new expressions through 「reibun」 searches and native-speaker explanation sites.
Host Daniel Morales explains the Japanese business terms 'onsha' and 'heisha'—'replacement pronouns' used to refer to another company and one's own company respectively.
Daniel Morales of How to Japanese Podcast frames Episode 58 around 修飾, the Japanese grammar of modification, and says his November 2024 newsletter focused on a difficult sentence from Kanae Miyako’s essay「Mazu」.
Daniel Morales discusses Japanese language learning through the lens of 'impossible pairs'—words that sound similar but have different meanings.
Daniel Morales explores the linguistic evolution of 'seichi junrei' from religious pilgrimage term to modern anime tourism descriptor.
Daniel Morales centers Episode 68 of How to Japanese on the word itadaki, especially the contrast between kudasai, kudasaru, and itadaki-based forms.
Episode 47 of How to Japanese focuses on Murakami translation collecting, especially Alfred Birnbaum editions of Norwegian Wood and the market for first-edition Japanese paperbacks.
Daniel Morales of HowToJapanese.com explains why 五月雨式 is pronounced samidare shiki instead of gogatsu ameshiki, and he links the word to intermittent rainy-season weather and split delivery in Japanese business writing.
Episode 50 of How to Japanese centers on sentence diagramming, using a long Japanese sentence about McDonald's bacon potato pie as the main example.
Daniel Morales frames Episode 71 of How to Japanese as a month off taken while his wife and he are expecting, then turns the episode into a guided tour of old writing.
Daniel Morales opens in Osaka in October 2025, saying summer has finally let go and fall is starting to show up in the mornings.
Episode 49 opens in March 2024, with the host circling back to the main topic from that month's newsletter.
Daniel Morales opens How To Japanese Podcast episode 45 by saying the main section will contain a spoiler for John Wick Chapter 4, then uses the movie's 'loving husband' gravestone subtitle to introduce the idea of collocation.
Daniel Morales discusses August heat in Osaka, gourmet kakigori culture evolution since 2010, personal summer ritual, major platform migration from Substack to Ghost newsletter platform with self-hosting future, and Japanese reported speech linguistic patterns.
Daniel Morales discusses strategies for advancing Japanese language skills, including reading Miyawaki Shunzo's train travel book and analyzing a key phrase from Murakami Haruki.
Daniel Morales opens with a special emergency update.
Host Daniel Morales shares his year-long experiment tracking writing metrics across blog, newsletter, and podcast production.
He opens with a move and a number: a new apartment, a 1,000-yen haircut, and the question of what counts as good value in Japan.
Daniel Morales opens with October 2024 and the weird almost-fall weather in Osaka.
Daniel Morales opens episode 51 of How to Japanese by describing Shinchou’s June 2024 issue, a 120th-anniversary volume that arrived on May 7 and runs over 600 pages.
Episode 73 of How to Japanese centers on the phrase "hajimete iwaremashita," which Daniel Morales introduces as a clear example of the Japanese passive form.
Daniel Morales starts with a quick apology for low mic levels.