> When you start to learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, you naturally expect some things to be different. Japanese has a different word order, uses Chinese kanji characters in a way that's similar to how English is augmented by Latin and Greek loan words, and is "agglutinating,' which just means information like past tense, passive voice etc. is often encoded into a verb conjugation.
One thing I was surprised by was Japan's creative use of "sound words" to add flavor to language. All languages have onomatopoeia, words which mimic sounds, like bang, slam, bark and tic…