Changing your PC’s language setting to Japanese is a great way to get daily exposure to a bunch of words, and to actually test your understanding of those words in a real way. There are drawbacks, like the possibility of running into unnatural translations (since after all much software is first written in another language… Read More »
In the Japanese language, while there are many variations, the basic word order looks like this: [subject] [object] [verb] 僕がりんごを食べた boku ga ringo wo tabeta I ate an apple. You can expand this out to include more types of speech like this: [topic] [subject] [direction or location of action] [object] [verb] [emotive particle(s)] 今日は僕が学校でりんごを食べたよ kyou… Read More »
Compared to English, Japanese is much more consistent and predictable in terms of how words are pronounced, at least at the level of vowels and constants (intonation is another story though). There are some exceptions, for example the word 大事 which can be read as “oogoto” or “daiji”, with a slight difference in meaning and… Read More »
Japanese verbs, a core part of the language, are relatively straightforward in terms of how they are structured (most end with a “u” sound, i.e. “taberu”, “kau”, “oyogu”, etc.) and how they are conjugated (unlike English verbs, 99.9% of verbs in Japanese follow a set of clear rules). Knowing how to understand and effectively use… Read More »
Compared to English, Japanese has countless differences in how things are expressed, including major things like word order, particles, and levels of politeness. However, if you ponder things long enough, and do enough research, you can often find something similar in English, or at least a roughly equivalent way to express things, whether that is… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over a Japanese expression that you don’t hear too often in conversation, but is somewhat common in literature, especially works that are a few decades old. The pattern is [adjective] + さに (sa ni). You can use i-adjectives or na-adjectives, but if you use the latter you need… Read More »
Learning useful day-to-day expressions is often one of the first priorities of a student of a foreign language, and being able to express being hungry (something which should happen to everyone daily) is pretty high on that list. The typical way we learn to express hunger is お腹が空く (onaka ga suku), which literally means “the… Read More »
In this post I want to go over a Japanese expression that builds on a few fundamental grammar aspects to make an interesting result. The expression can be described in generic form as 〜してもしきれない (~shite mo shikirenai), but you can switch the “suru” verbs with any other verb. First, let’s look an example: この染み、拭いても拭ききれない (kono… Read More »
I’m proud to announce the release my first anthology of Japanese literature containing a diverse set of stories from several authors, published in parallel English/Japanese for Japanese learners.
Sometimes when I see a thread flying by on Twitter and feel strongly towards the subject matter I will consider chiming in, but the problem is that trying to present a proper counter-argument on Twitter can be tricky. Sure, you can use a bunch of Tweets, but it gets hard to read, and also directly… Read More »