English-speakers tend to quickly pick up on the large number of words in Japanese that come from English (something I’ve written a few articles about). However, there are many loanwords in Japanese that originate from other languages such as Portuguese, Dutch, French, and German. It so happens that I have started studying German a little… Read More »
“Mono” in Japanese (usually written in hiragana as もの, and sometimes in kanji as 物) is a word that has the basic meaning of “thing”, generally in the sense of a physical (often tangible) thing. 店でいいものを買ったよ (mise de ii mono wo katta yo) I bought something good (=a good thing) at the store. However this… Read More »
Learning a language involves not just understanding the meanings of words and combinations of words, but also their nuances and when it is appropriate to use them. In this post, I would like to go over the casual expression “かもだけど” (ka mo da kedo). This expression is composed of two parts, the “ka mo” and… Read More »
Recently someone on Twitter was asking about the difference between “のが” (no ga) and ”のか” (no ka). I responded briefly to their post, but I wanted to give a little more detailed treatment here. In the case of “のか”, the の is often used to an explanatory or factual feeling, similar to how it does… Read More »
One significant difference between Japanese and a language like English is that words are more frequently omitted when they can be inferred from context. This applies to pretty much all types of speech: verbs, nouns, objects, and even particles (little grammatical helpers). In English, except for some special cases and slang usages, when referring to… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over the meaning, origin, and usage of the word “yosage”, which can be written either in full hiragana (よさげ) or in a mix of kanji and hiragana (良さげ). This word can be a bit confusing since you might think the verb “sageru” (to lower) is related, though it… Read More »
Yesterday I did a brief survey-style quiz on Twitter with the following single question: Quick Japanese Quiz: What is a polite way to ask someone to begin eating a meal? Answer choices: (note: the romaji didn’t fit in the original post due to length limitations) 食ってくれ [kutte kure] いただきなさい [itadakinasai] 召し上がってください [meshiagatte kudasai] お腹にお入れいただけませんか？ [onaka… Read More »
Changing your PC’s language setting to Japanese is a great way to get daily exposure to a bunch of words, and to actually test your understanding of those words in a real way. There are drawbacks, like the possibility of running into unnatural translations (since after all much software is first written in another language… Read More »
I’ve written a large amount (probably several hundred) of articles about Japanese grammar on this blog, but for a change I thought I would write about a different topic, targeting a slightly different group of people: a list of reasons to learn Japanese. This sort of list is inherently subjective, and perhaps some of these… Read More »
In the Japanese language, while there are many variations, the basic word order looks like this: [subject] [object] [verb] 僕がりんごを食べた boku ga ringo wo tabeta I ate an apple. You can expand this out to include more types of speech like this: [topic] [subject] [direction or location of action] [object] [verb] [emotive particle(s)] 今日は僕が学校でりんごを食べたよ kyou… Read More »