The Japanese language is known for its heavy omission of all sorts of words when they can be inferred from context: objects, subjects, and even particles (tiny words that act as grammatical glue in a way similar to prepositions). Even simple everyday sentences like “食べた” (“I ate it”) can have multiple omissions (in that case,… Read More »
I’m proud to announce the release of a new translation of two of Kyusaku Yumeno’s works, published in both English-only and parallel Japanese/English formats.
When exploring the spacious Kinokuniya in download Portland the other day, I couldn’t decide what to buy so I ended up picking up on a whim the first episode of “Oyasumi Punpun” by Inio Asano. It has a pretty simple cover that is pure yellow, except for an embossed image on the front that I… Read More »
Musings and hints on the difficulties of learning conversation in a foreign language, inspired by a twitter post of someone who was struggling to learn conversation in Japanese without a teacher.
Understanding jokes and other forms of comedy in a foreign language can be a difficult undertaking for language learners. To begin with, comedic wordplay based on homonyms (two words with the same sound but different meaning) is often used and may involve subtle aspects of pronunciation (intonation, etc.) Pop culture references are also abundant, including… Read More »
As I confirmed myself a few years ago, Japanese has a large number of homonyms––words that have the same sound but different meanings. Personally I’m divided on the efficacy of teaching the various meanings of a single word together, since it can confuse language learners, but sometimes it can be good to know all the… Read More »
In this post I will go over the expression “〜からすると” (~kara suru to), including a few examples and related expressions. To start the discussion, let’s look at a concrete example sentence. 色からするとかなり古いだろうね。 (iro kara suru to kanari furui darou ne.) Now let’s look at each piece of the phrase “kara suru to”: から (kara): A… Read More »
In this article I’d like to go over the expression ともなく (to mo naku), which you may come across when reading Japanese literature. While it is usually written in hiragana as ともなく, sometimes you can see it written in a mix of kanji and hiragana as とも無く It’s composed of three parts: the particle “to”,… Read More »
In this post I go over the expression 「言葉が足りず、すみませんでした」, including some variations and related expressions.
It’s rare that I read blogs written in English about Japanese, but there is one blog I do check out pretty often so I thought I would highlight in a focused post: landofnu.com. This blog, which seems to have started in February 2011, has a variety of topics: Japanese (kotowaza and 4-letter compounds), fiction, non-fiction,… Read More »