The nuances of expressing politeness is one of the most difficult parts of mastering the Japanese language, especially if your native language doesn’t have a strong concept of politeness levels (in my opinion, English does not). One of the things I always talk about when asked about politeness is the verb trio “kureru”, “morau”, and… Read More »
I’m always on the lookout for different ways to help people throughout the world improve their Japanese. For example, a few months ago I started experimenting with free online classes, and I also have a series of articles about practicing writing in Japanese (Japanese Writing Lab). After having an exchange with one of my readers… Read More »
When studying a foreign language, once you are able to learn enough grammar, characters, and vocabulary to be able to start reading books made for native-speakers, a new world of nearly unlimited knowledge opens to you. This is true not just for entertainment (novels, etc.), but also for study materials such as textbooks. This post… Read More »
When learning a foreign language (or anything for that matter), the more you can interact with the material, the more likely you are to maintain focus and retain what was learned. For example, in order to improve conversation ability, the best way is clearly to have frequent real conversations with native or fluent speakers. But… Read More »
All over the internet you can find discussions about why certain languages are difficult to learn, and I have seen my share of those for Japanese language. So for a chance of pace I thought I would take the opposite angle and talk about a few things that you generally don’t have to worry about… Read More »
When studying a foreign language, one often looks up words in their native language (in my case, English) and then remembers that definition, hoping that eventually that definition can be replaced with a sense of what the word means without having to rely on a another language. While that process can work, you can run… Read More »
(quick link to my new particle quiz book on Amazon) For anyone who has followed this blog you probably know that in the last few years I’ve started putting out eBooks with my translations of various pieces of Japanese literature. A few of these are in parallel Japanese / English to help those studying Japanese,… Read More »
The Japanese language has a small number of verb tenses, but in place of those are various combinations of words that can be tricky to understand and translate. In this article I’d like to go over the phrase 疲れにくくなる(tsukare nikuku naru) that combines three words to create one idea. First I’d like to review the… Read More »
I’m a pretty serious sweet tooth, to the extent that some years ago I maintained a blog about reviewing sweet products. But recently I realized I was misunderstanding a Japanese word related to sweets so I thought I would post about my experience. The other day when I was speaking in Japanese, I used the… Read More »
In this article I wanted to go over a Japanese phrase that I think is used fairly commonly in everyday conversation, 食べていく (tabete iku).