Learn Japanese FAQ

Q: Hi Richard..
First of all arigato gozaimasu for this site i raelly like Japanese and your site helped me  a LOT ..so my question is when someone says arigato how do we say (you are welcome) in Japanese – Daliya from Palestine

A: It is どういたしまして – do u i ta shi ma shi te.  It is however a bit of a mouthful (it took me ages to be able to say it!) so you can always get away with saying いいえ, iie – “no, it was nothing” and a hand gesture to say it was nothing!

…and another thing ..i know that there are three languages in japan (hiragana and katakana )as i remember is there a different words for the same meanings?? like is there another word to say arigato??

The different alphabets are just different ways of writing the same word.  So you could write arigatou as ありがとう or 有難う (although you don’t see the kanji that often).    Some words do mean the same thing, e.g. both “kimi” and “anata” mean “you”,  but I don’t think there’s anything that replaces arigatou, you hear it all the time!