Latham's Guide to Japanese Baseball:

Basic Japanese:
Breaking down the language barrier

From buying tickets to reading a scoreboard, the language barrier often makes it difficult for foreigners to attend Japanese baseball games. Because this entire web site is dedicated to making Japanese baseball more accessible to foreign fans, it's important that we take a look at how to overcome the language barrier. The following pages can help.

Ballpark phrases: Learn how to buy tickets, find your seat, purchase food and beverages, and cheer with the locals.

Dictionary: Fortunately, a lot of Japanese baseball terms are borrowed from English, including four-ball (to walk a batter), centa (center fielder), pitcha (pitcher) and many more. Recognizing these terms can be very helpful if you watch a game on TV.

Scoreboard: If you plan to attend a Japanese baseball game, learn how to read the local scoreboards.

Team names: In most Japanese newspapers, web sites (including Yahoo!), baseball guide books and scoreboards, teams are listed by the first kanji or katakana symbol in their name. There are only twelve and they are easy to learn.

Katakana (for reading foreign names): One of three Japanese writing systems, katakana is a phonetic alphabet used to convey foreign words and names. Learn how to read the names of foreign players on Japanese scoreboards, web sites, television and newspapers.

Kanji (for reading Japanese names): Kanji are Chinese characters used to write Japanese words and names. Although there are several thousand kanji, if you learn just a few, you can figure out a lot of names on Japanese scoreboards.

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