One frustrating thing about learning foreign languages is that many aspects of language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.) can appear to be random or arbitrary. I remember when learning Spanish my teacher used to respond to such comments by saying “One day, a long long time ago, there was a man who sat on a hill and decided… Read More »
In a recent poll of mine there was many responders who said they wanted to learn more about Japanese grammar from this blog. While there are many sites and books out there that have a great deal of useful information about Japanese grammar, I thought I would write a post that looks at grammar from… Read More »
Color words in Japanese exist in two different forms: i-adjectives and nouns. Some of them are present in only one form (usually the noun form), but many are present in both. I’ll present a list of basic colors along with the different forms that color exists as, with the i-adjective form first (if present). Red:… Read More »
The other day I heard from someone that they were having difficulty learning to read Japanese, such that they had to re-read passages several times over to fully grasp the meaning, and generally had trouble thinking in Japanese when reading. This is a difficult problem indeed, one I have faced for many years myself. I have… Read More »
It’s time for one of those posts which I rarely do – one where I focus on a single word. This time not only is it a single word, but a single character and single sound. “し” can mean everything from poetry (詩) to death (死), but in this case I’m referring to neither. Rather… Read More »
Succeeding in learning a foreign language, especially one very different from your native tongue, requires many traits: a good memory, time management, the ability to experiment and learn to pronounce foreign sounds, listening skills, and an analytical ability to comprehend and use various grammatical constructions. But there is one critical trait that is often overlooked… Read More »
One of the big grammatical differences between Japanese and English is the way adjectival clauses are formed, and getting familiar with this will help you on the road to better understanding of Japanese, and more advanced sentence creation. The basic use of single-word adjectives is the same in Japanese in English, and the reverse in… Read More »
I’ve mentioned in a few posts how background knowledge on a certain subject will make comprehension, and acquisition of new vocabulary words much easier when reading or listening to foreign language content related to that subject. For example, if you are very familiar with biology and read a Japanese biological journal, you’ll be able to… Read More »
There are some aspects of Japanese culture you aren’t likely to come across until you live with a Japanese family – whether that is in Japan or elsewhere. One of those is ふりかけ (furikake), which literally means “sprinkle” and is a Japanese condiment which is commonly sprinkled on top of rice. There are many varieties with… Read More »
パラ読み – a quick perusal of written text – is an important skill that we take for granted with our native language. We can slow down and analyze word by word when trying to grasp content fully, and speed up when we just want to grasp the basic concepts. With a foreign language, the process… Read More »