While I am by no means a heavy Netflix watcher, I like to browse the movies and series once in a while and try out anything that looks interesting. More often than not, I end up getting bored partway through and don’t finish the series or the movie. But just the other day I ended… Read More »
Languages are filled with combinations of certain words that are used to express something that is more than the sum of their parts. You can call these “expressions”, though I like to call them the slightly more fitting term “grammar pattern”. These can be especially tricky to learn because sometimes you can’t simply look them… Read More »
Arigatai Books is proud to announce the release of a new ebook with short stories from a fresh (albeit classic) voice, Masao Yamakawa, an Akutagawa/Naoki-nominated writer with a unique literary style. The stories are published in both bilingual English/Japanese and English-only versions.
In this article I would like to describe how to express the idea of being “cool” in Japanese, along with a few related points. “Cool” has a bunch of meanings in English, so I want to clarify I am talking about the “stylish”, “fashionable” or “good” meaning, which isn’t related to temperature. The most common… Read More »
My review of head of Ki-Aikido Shin’ichi Tohei’s latest book about improving your posture and breathing in order to maximize your potential as a person, including applications to many daily-life areas such as driving, sitting, and even washing dished. This book is strongly related to a NHK special that ran last year on similar topics.
In Japanese, 嬉しい (ureshii) and 幸せ (shiawase) are two words that express happiness, but they have a very different connotation. “Ureshii” is more about a (potentially short-lived) feeling of pleasure or contentment, as in “You look happy today”, whereas “shiawase” is more about a big-picture (potentially long-term) state of happiness in terms of being fortunate… Read More »
To celebrate the release of Volume 6 of my series of Japanese classic fairy tales this week, I’ve decided to run a little giveaway where I give out 6 free copies of the audiobook of Volume 1 of this series. As I will be using promo codes provided by Audible, you will have to have… Read More »
I’m happy to announce the 6th book of my series on Japanese classic fairy tales, written by Mimei Ogawa. The highlight this time is “The Reincarnation of a Sake Glass”, a tale about a special sake glass across several generations.
In this post, I wanted to discuss an interesting connection between the volitional form in Japanese and the words “deshou” / “darou”. To begin with I will go over the meaning of each, and then see how they relate. The volitional form represents the speaker’s volition, or will, and for the verb “suru” looks like… Read More »
One important aspect of the Japanese language, especially compared to English, is how nearly anything can be omitted––at least as long as the context is sufficient for the reader/listener to guess what is missing. But for those used to explicitly stating things (even if they are ‘obvious’ from the context), it can be tricky to… Read More »