Quickly getting bored with academic learning materials, I always search for new ways to use Japanese without actually living in Japan. Typically, the more fun the activity is the more positive feedback there is and the more likely it will continue. One game which is entertaining and requires no physical props or materials is game of… Read More »
One great thing about having kids is you get to see all the cutesy videos made for them. When my son was very young he was into the “Super Simple Learning” videos on Youtube, especially the “Twinkle Twinkle little star” one, which has great visuals and sound. Bringing up my son bilingually Japanese, I also… Read More »
(Please note, this post was an April fools joke.) As it’s now the first of the month, in this post I’d like to focus on a first-person pronoun I’ve been hearing alot lately. While modern English has pretty much only “I”, Japanese has many of these words including “boku”, “watashi”, “atashi”, and even “washi” (and that’s… Read More »
In Japanese, differences in position, experience, and age are considered very important and are built into the language itself in the form of words that indicate where someone is with respect to others. This concept is expressed in the terms 先輩 (senpai), which refers to someone older or with more experience, and 後輩 (kouhai), which… Read More »
As we all know, one of the best ways to learn a foreign language is immerse yourself in an environment where it is beneficial, even necessary to communicate in that language. One of the pitfalls of this type of situation is that there is always the chance of miscommunication, either because you make a mistake… Read More »
In Japanese, you can use the word 興味 (‘kyoumi’) to talk about interest in something. It is typically coupled with the が or は, plus the verb for inanimate existence, ある (‘aru’), or some derivation of it (negative form, polite form, etc.). Let’s start with a simple example: それは全然興味がありません。 I am not interested in that at… Read More »
In previous posts I talked about a few theories about why Japanese has so many loanwords, especially from English. This time I’d like to discuss some of the specific words themselves. Once the Katakana alphabet is learned, loanwords become a great help as many of them can be understood by English-speakers by simply sounding them out without having to… Read More »
When learning a foreign language, it’s usually assumed that in addition to spoken language studies (listening and speaking) there will be a focus placed on written language (reading and writing). At first you might think the only difference is learning characters vs sounds, but there is much more involved. As a result there are some differences in… Read More »
Japanese has two verb types, consonant (godan) verbs and vowel (ichidan) verbs, each with their corresponding conjugations. Here is an example of each with conjugation into the past and -masu forms. Vowel (ichidan) 食べる (taberu) – to eat Past: 食べた (tabeta) ~Masu (polite): 食べます (tabemasu) Consonant verb (godan) 分かる (wakaru) – to understand Past: 分かった… Read More »
I’ve released my 3rd Japanese quiz, this time on transitive/intransitive verbs. Take it here: testmoz.com/458663 Here are the details: Quiz Topic: Differentiating between Japanese transitive / intransitive verbs: Number of questions: 10 Question style: Multiple choice – each question has two verb, one intransitive verb and one transitive verb. Some of the verbs are conjugated. Required… Read More »