Listening or reading to many types of Japanese––novels, newspapers, blogs, TV shows, movies, anime, magazines––is a great way to increase your vocabulary. It also helps you train that elusive skill for what just sounds “natural”. However, in Japanese (and perhaps many other languages) there is an important distinction between spoken language (話し言葉) and written language… Read More »
Japanese particles––small words with big grammatical and affective meanings––are one of the things that make the language unique. They can cause problems for those who are not too strong with grammar, but once you spend some time studying them I think you’ll find out their usages and meanings are pretty logical (though the particles with… Read More »
Lately I’ve been trying to write articles that go deeply into a single expression or word. In this post I’d like to focus on the word “yoroshiku”, which is often written in Japanese using hiragana (よろしく). It also can be written in kanji as 宜しく or occasionally in katakana as ヨロシク. The word yoroshiku is… Read More »
In this post, I’d like to focus on the word 相談 (そうだん / soudan) for two reasons: it’s high frequency in business-level Japanese and the fact it doesn’t have a great single-world (one-size-fits-all) translation in English. I’d like to begin the explanation by giving the Japanese definition of the word from Dictionary Goo, followed by… Read More »
I’m always surprised by the diversity of language and how vocabulary words tend to group into what I call “domains”. For example, many terms you read in an economic newspaper are not likely to pop up in everyday conversation, and slang words you hear on the street are not too likely be used in a… Read More »
I’m sure many people are working full time for a company that they don’t own any part of, getting paid on a periodic rate based on a set contract. And I’m also willing to bet that a good portion of those people wish they could go independent and become their own boss, choosing what and… Read More »
As you’ve probably already discovered, Japanese has a huge number of loanwords, especially from English––and that number seems to be increasing fast. Fortunately, a majority of these can be guessed from context if you can manage to match them up to their original word by sound. But some of them are hard to guess because… Read More »
In Japanese, there are many transitive/intransitive verb pairs, whereas in English we use often word order to describe whether an action is transitive or intransitive. Masting these pairs is an important step in becoming fluent in Japanese. As a simple example, let’s take つける (tsukeru), a transitive verb with a bunch of meanings, but for… Read More »
This is the 6th assignment of a program I am running to help myself and others practice writing in Japanese. For details, see this post. Also see this post for a list of all assignments. [Update: I have fixed the link here, apologizes for the trouble.] This time the topic will be “僕の住む場所” (boku no sumu basho), which means “Where I… Read More »
When learning words in a foreign language (Japanese or any other), it can be frustrating because some words seem to stick immediately whether others take many iterations. While I think some of this just the unpredictability of our memories, it can be instructive to think about what drives this process and to develop ways to… Read More »