As I confirmed myself a few years ago, Japanese has a large number of homonyms––words that have the same sound but different meanings. Personally I’m divided on the efficacy of teaching the various meanings of a single word together, since it can confuse language learners, but sometimes it can be good to know all the… Read More »
In this post I will go over the expression “〜からすると” (~kara suru to), including a few examples and related expressions. To start the discussion, let’s look at a concrete example sentence. 色からするとかなり古いだろうね。 (iro kara suru to kanari furui darou ne.) Now let’s look at each piece of the phrase “kara suru to”: から (kara): A… Read More »
In this article I’d like to go over the expression ともなく (to mo naku), which you may come across when reading Japanese literature. While it is usually written in hiragana as ともなく, sometimes you can see it written in a mix of kanji and hiragana as とも無く It’s composed of three parts: the particle “to”,… Read More »
In this post I go over the expression 「言葉が足りず、すみませんでした」, including some variations and related expressions.
During my Japanese studies, I’ve made it a point to try and have a thorough understanding of Japanese grammar because I feel that it gives me a good base not only for speaking and writing correctly, but also understanding nuances of the language I might otherwise miss. Just the other day the word “呼ばされる” (yobasareru)… Read More »
In this post I talked about Japan’s “Braille Blocks”, a system that is employed throughout Japan to assist the visually-impaired.
My friend and collaborator Kaimai Mizuhiro (開米瑞浩) is working on an project that I think will be interesting to those studying Japanese, so I’ll talk about it a little here. Kaimai has a bunch of books out, and a common thread throughout them is how to communicate effectively (both verbally and with diagrams) in a… Read More »
In this post I give over 50 introductory phrases, with translations. that can be used as starting blocks to build Japanese sentences.
You probably know that the Japanese word “sono” means “that”, but in this article I will talk about an alternate way it can be used.
In many ways Japanese grammar is simpler than English grammar, especially in terms of fewer tenses to deal with and the omission of unnecessary words. However, sometimes thinking in terms of English can make it difficult to understand seemingly simple Japanese sentences. In this post I’d like to talk about the expression 「もっと早く知りたかった」 (“motto hayaku… Read More »