I got feedback from one of my readers that sometimes differentiating between で and に can be difficult, so I made a mini 8-question quiz to test everyone’s knowledge in this area. You can take it here: testmoz.com/450945 If you’d like to review before the test, you can see this post of mine which goes over the… Read More »
(Update: I liked making particle quizzes so much I made a whole book of them, you can read all about it here) Writing posts about Japanese is fun and all, but one of the reasons I started this blog was because I like teaching, and have had some experience myself teaching a different topic at… Read More »
Often when learning a foreign language, one has to not only learn verbs and nouns, but also natural combinations of the two which make expressions. For example, let’s take the following English sentence. Yesterday I had a good dream. If we were to translate this word-by-word to Japanese (shifting around words for correct word ordering),… Read More »
As a follow up to my previous article as to why Japanese has so many loanwords (where I quoted a Japanese person’s opinion on this topic) I’d like to present my own thoughts here. First of all, there is the question of whether Japanese really has that many loanwords. While it is clear there is an… Read More »
Anyone who has studied Japanese knows that the language contains loanwords called 外来語 (“gairaigo”), which words ‘borrowed’ from another language and imported into Japanese. As part of this transition, the works take on a new spelling and pronunciation, which can be a shortened version or one containing syllables from multiple words. The meaning itself can… Read More »
The Japanese word “大変” (taihen), made out of the characters for “large” and “change”, and is typically used for two related meanings which I will go over in this post, along with example sentences. The first is to express something is extreme, and can roughly match with english “very” or “terribly”. When using it as an… Read More »
In Japan, as well as some other Eastern cultures, rice is eaten daily and products made from rice are very abundant: rice wine, sweets made from rice (mochi), even rice paper. Rice is not only relatively inexpensive and nutrient-rich, but it can be made quite easy at home in a device called a “suihanki” (炊飯器), or rice-cooker.… Read More »
The Japanese term “調子” is quite a multifaceted word with seven definitions in the dictionary, as well as a handful of expressions and compound words that use it. In this post I’ll talk about the usages of it that I have heard most, and I feel are most likely to be useful. The primary definitions for… Read More »
“Seiza” is a Japanese traditional way of sitting which has been around since the Edo Period (17th century), and involves kneeling so that ones knees touch the floor, with feet are folded underneath, resting roughly below the spine. See this page for a picture of people sitting in a group in seiza. There are different variations… Read More »
Japanese pitch accent (something I’ve written about before) is tricky because each word has a different combination of up and down pitches, and sometimes the accent of one word can affect a word immediately after it. To make things even more complicated, different regional dialects of Japanese have very different patterns of accents – for example… Read More »