In Japanese, kakko カッコ means either "appearance" or "parenthesis." In the former case, it's also spelled kakko かっこ and found in compound words.

• "Appearance"
  • カッコいい, カッコ悪い
  • カッコつけて
• "Parenthesis"

There are a lot of animes about sports, for some strange reason, and we all love to watch them showing the characters' hard work and sweat pay off while we're comfortably seated behind the screen. But what are those sports called in Japanese?

In Japanese, furigana 振り仮名 is a text written next to a certain character, word, or phrase, that shows how you're supposed to read it. It's also called "ruby text," rubi ルビ (the opposite being base text), or "reading aid," although it also has some non-reading-aid, creative uses.

For example: 今日日（きょうび） shows the word kyoubi 今日日, "these days," "in modern times," which has kanji 漢字 characters. Inside parentheses is the furigana: k-yo-u-bi きょうび, showing how the word is read using hiragana ひらがな characters.

Have you ever wondered how a fighting style is written in Japanese? Like boxing... or kickboxing... or chinese kickboxing... or drunken, chinese kickboxing? Or maybe how karate is written in Japanese? Well, worry no more, I've compiled a list of those names for you.