Of all of the activities we do on a daily basis, I feel that the act of communicating with another person using spoken language and a series of back and forth exchanges, what we call “conversation”, holds a very unique place. If you think about all the things involved in this process, and how closely it is… Read More »
In a previous blog post I discussed how the element of necessity makes the brain more active in the learning process, increasing retention and understanding of foreign language. One little trick I discovered is that if you are planning on giving a summary to someone about some media you are consuming (article, podcast, movie, etc.)… Read More »
「そう」 is a very simple word in Japanese that is used extremely often for a variety of situations. It’s meaning is similar to the English “so”, as in the sentence “I told you so”. It’s a mix of the concepts “that” and “true”. This word is commonly used as a light acknowledgement to a question.… Read More »
When studying any foreign language, there are many things one has to learn and grow accustomed to: pronunciation, grammar, and characters, to name a few. In my study of Japanese I feel that I have a fairly good grasp of many of these things, not necessarily to the degree of what I would call ‘fluent’,… Read More »
In a recent post I commented how bad of an idea it is to use English subtitles when watching Japanese TV shows. When doing so, your brain gets lazy and stops trying to process the stream of Japanese, or at least reduces focus on it. Having said that, there is a way to use subtitles… Read More »
When studying a foreign language, we have no choice but to resort to dictionaries time and time again to help comprehend new words and search for ways to express ourselves more effectively. Having said that,after many years of using dictionaries as a reference, I’ve learned to not over rely on them, sometimes even going as… Read More »
For those Japanese learners who understand a good amount of Kanji, grammar constructs, and vocabulary, your options for study materials are drastically increased. Thats because you can use sites and books that native speakers would use. I’ll introduce a few of my favorite resources in this post. １）教えてgoo (http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/) This site is extremely valuable for… Read More »
During my study of the Japanese language, oftentimes I cannot help but think fundamentally about how humans learn a foreign language, or any language for that matter. Some years back when I was more actively studying linguistics, I read a very interesting book called “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker (see wikipedia page here). As… Read More »
This time we’ll learn some age-related expressions in Japanese. Age is dealt with a little differently compared to English so it’s good to make sure you have the basics down. The simplest way to say “age” is とし（年）which also means “year”. Here are two common expressions when asking age (remember いくつ means “how many”): お年、いくつですか？… Read More »
ひらがな、よめますか？ If I could go back to the time when I first began learning Japanese and change one thing, it would be to learn the hiragana alphabet as fast as possible, and avoid romaji (the romanized version of japanese script) like the plague. This is something I’ve seen expressed on other Japanese-learning web sites and… Read More »