In this post I talked about the results of my review of using ChatGPT for explaining Japanese grammar, focusing on a particularly concerning case of a hallucination about particles.
Japanese has a fairly complex set of ways to express politeness, but in terms of verbs there are two primary forms, the regular form and the polite form. The regular form includes the regular non-past or dictionary form, for example 食べる [taberu]. Other forms like the te-form (食べて [tabete]) are also considered to be non-polite.… Read More »
After seeing how a student of Japanese was using ChatGPT to write a daily journal, I decided to put down some of my thoughts on using ChatGPT and other AI tools for Japanese learning.
I’m happy to announce the release of my first book about Japanese grammar fundamentals: “Japanese Grammar Gatten!”, available now on Amazon.
I’m proud to announce the release of a new book in my bilingual reader series, “Kantan! Read Japanese Stories Like a Native” by classic science fiction author Juza Unno.
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 »