In this article I’d like to go over the expression “darou ni” (だろうに), which can be a little difficult to understand the first time you encounter it. As usual, before we look at this expression’s meaning let’s see what the individual parts mean. First we have “darou” (だろう), a word used to express the speaker’s… Read More »
I reviewed Yuu Nagira’s novel “My Beautiful Garden”, a story about the interconnected lives of a few people facing various problems.
Understanding jokes and other forms of comedy in a foreign language can be a difficult undertaking for language learners. To begin with, comedic wordplay based on homonyms (two words with the same sound but different meaning) is often used and may involve subtle aspects of pronunciation (intonation, etc.) Pop culture references are also abundant, including… Read More »
In this post I give a list of words which contain kanji not commonly used in modern Japanese anymore, as a way to help those wanting to get into reading classical literature that is 50+ years old.
I published my translation of the essay “My Life” by Hayashi Fumiko (林芙美子), a notable woman Japanese author of the early 20th century.
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.
It’s rare that I read blogs written in English about Japanese, but there is one blog I do check out pretty often so I thought I would highlight in a focused post: landofnu.com. This blog, which seems to have started in February 2011, has a variety of topics: Japanese (kotowaza and 4-letter compounds), fiction, non-fiction,… Read More »
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 »
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.