In Japanese, the word for ‘hand’ is written as 手 and pronounced close to the English “te” sound from “tell”. In this post I’ll talk about a few words that use this character, plus other meanings of it. To start with, in baby-speak the word “お手手” (otete) is often used to mean “hand”. The word for “wrist”… Read More »
In Japanese, you may have learned that the “ている” form can be used to express a state rather than an ongoing action, like ”壊れている” (broken). There is another way to express state using a noun or na-adjective, plus “でいる”. The “で” is the “te” form of “だ” (is), and “いる” is the same as in… Read More »
Since my last article on Japanese expressions about food got a few likes, I thought I would write a follow-up one with a few more expressions. 腹持ち (haramochi) This expression is used to refer to how well something keeps in the stomach (i.e. how long it takes to digest), and is usually used in the… Read More »
The Japanese verb 切る, pronounced “kiru”, is one of the verbs typically introduced in basic level Japanese textbooks. This is because it is an example of verb that end sin ‘iru’ but is conjugated as a constant verb, and also because it’s easy to understand conceptually. In this post I’ll show some related uses of… Read More »
For today’s post I’d like to focus on the Japanese expression “kke” (っけ) which is typically used at the end of a sentence, and signifies that the speaker/writer is trying to remember something. For example: 今日は何曜日だっけ？ What day of the week was it again? This expression can be used when you are talking to yourself in an… Read More »
In this article I’d like to discuss a few things to watch out when learning Japanese, most of which were something I struggled with personally. The first is when talking about meeting someone in Japanese. If you aren’t careful, you might first think “I want to see you tonight” and then translate this as “今晩、君を見たい” which… Read More »
In this post I’d like to discuss a few ways to express probability and possibility in Japanese. I think most of you already know about some of the more basic ways to express uncertainty in Japanese, for example: かもしれない (sometimes abbreviated as かも） (じゃない) かな でしょう (discussed here) たぶん These all can be used to… Read More »
I this post I’d like to compare the two Japanese particles で and に, both which are used very frequently in everyday Japanese. I’m not going to do a thorough treatment of either particle covering all possible uses (there are many for both), but I’ll summarize a few of the most common usages. で is… Read More »
Studying a foreign language, there are many times when you get stuck and just don’t know what to say. Sure, you can just mutter a “ちょっと待って” (wait) and clam up for a few seconds to think, but that would set you apart from what a native would do in similar circumstances. It’s best to give… Read More »
I recently wrote a post on usages of ‘そう’ coupled with a few particles, and I decided to write a second article with a few other things I thought of on this subject. In that post I mentioned the phrases そうだね and そうだよ, but what if you remove the だ from these? Well, the word… Read More »