Having trouble finding opportunities to practice writing in Japanese? In this post I wrote in Japanese about a fun experience I had. I ask you to try doing the same, and in exchange I’ll give my feedback on your writing. Japanese learners of any level are invited, and there is no length requirements on the result.
In this article I’d like to go over the Japanese expression “dake atte” (だけあって), particularly because the meaning is not quite what you expect given the words comprising it. But first let’s look at those words as a starting point. だけ (dake) is probably a word you’ve come across before, and many times it is… Read More »
I picked up “To Avoid Being Swept Away by a Large Bird” by Hiromi Kawakami for the usual reasons––an interesting description on the cover, a curious title, and a reasonable length––but reading the first few paragraphs helped me close the deal (although I admit it was more because the prose was easy to read than… Read More »
I decided to translate a poem by the 4th-century Chinese poet Tao Yuanming (陶淵明), leveraging both the original text as well as Japanese translations and explanations.
In this article, I reviewed the novel 首里の馬 (“The Horse of Shuri”) by 高山 羽根子 (Takayama Haneko), a book with interesting ideas that I felt fell a little short on execution.
In this post I go deep into the phrase “僕に言われても” and try to figure out why “に” is used, which seems to be contradictory with typical usages of it.
I reviewed the latest novel by Matayoshi Naoki (又吉直樹), titled “Ningen:” (人間).
The majority of the review is via a Youtube video, but I have also provided a summary of my findings.
Compared to other languages, such as English and Spanish, Japanese has a fairly small number of verb tenses. So it’s not much of a surprise that some of the tenses have many different uses, and often do not give much information as to when an action happened. In this post I’d like to talk about… Read More »
It’s not uncommon for one word in a language to have multiple meanings, but for non-native learners it can be challenge to figure out all the meanings from context. Japanese is no exception, although intonation (depending on region) and kanji selection can help to differentiate meanings in some cases. In this post I want to… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over the expression “とんだとばっちりを食う” (tonda tobacchiri wo kuu) which can be a little tricky to understand. Before talking about the overall meaning I want to look at each of the components. With the exception of children’s books, written Japanese generally does not have spaces between the words. Having… Read More »