For beginner students I don’t recommend listening/reading a lot of Japanese where characters speak in a regional or other accent. While it’s good to have some understanding of other styles of accents beyond the typical Tokyo-dialect (東京弁), my concern is that you might unintentionally pick up something and use it without knowing it’s not typical… Read More »
In Japanese, many verbs have both a transitive (where an action occurs against an object) and intransitive form (where an action occurs on its own, without an object). Even though these forms can be expressed in English to a certain extent, there can be some subtle nuances. Lately I came across a sentence in Japanese… Read More »
Japanese verbs often conveniently come in transitive/intransitive pairs, but sometimes those verbs don’t have the meanings you would expect. In this post I’d like to talk about “ukeru”（受ける） and “ukaru”（受かる), two verbs that are pretty important in daily life. The first of these, “ukeru” is the transitive one, which means it takes an object using… Read More »
In this episode of my podcast for learning basic Japanese grammar, I go over the word “you” that is commonly used to compare one thing to another. I also go over a useful expression for making a wish.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of articles related to audio or video stuff, and haven’t written too much about grammar or the process of learning Japanese. Part of the reason is a lack of ideas for content. That’s why when I received an email from a reader asking if I had any suggestions for… Read More »
In this episode of my podcast for learning basic Japanese grammar, I go over the potential form and a few related conjugations. I also go over a casual way of asking “Really?”
Lately I have been doing less articles about grammar and expressions and more on media reviews and other topics, but since I recently got a request from a colleague I thought I would give a treatment of the expression 何となく “nan to naku” (which can also be written in full hiragana as なんとなく). First, let’s… Read More »
In recent years I have been more active on Twitter/X and a little less active on this blog, though I am still trying to keep up the pace of at least one article a week. Besides the persistency of blog articles vs. the transience of Twitter posts, there is the fact that it’s much easier… Read More »
In this episode of my podcast for learning basic Japanese grammar, I go over the “ne” particle and a few expressions for saying goodbye.
In this episode of my podcast for learning basic Japanese grammar, I go over the “ne” particle and a few expressions for saying goodbye.