Recently I was contacted by the owner of the website BFF Tokyo, and I ended up offering to do a review of his site. The site is relatively new and I will keep that in mind while writing the review. In case you didn’t know, “BFF” stands for “Best Friends Forever”, and while this expression… Read More »
After getting a recommendation for the Japanese fiction novel 天使の卵 (“Angel’s Egg” or “Angel Egg”) by 村山由佳 (Yuka Murayama), I decided to give it a shot. The book turned out to be a very rewarding read, so in this post I’ll review it. This book is about the experiences of the 19-year old male narrator,… Read More »
When talking about language we often group words into categories such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, and so on. These so-called “parts of speech” help us understand the roles of each word and figure out how to fit them together with other words. However, the reality is that words in one category can often cross over… Read More »
In my early years studying Japanese I watched a huge number of Japanese dramas, and while this really helped improved my listening and vocabulary skills, it also made me accustomed––or should I say overly sensitive––to the common tropes of this form of media. That, plus the fact I generally try to spend more time in… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over the Japanese word “kudaranai”, which is often written in hiragana as くだらない, and sometimes in kanji as 下らない. As usual, I’ll first go into the basic meanings, followed by a discussion about the word origin and relevant nuances. The meanings of this word are fairly easy to… Read More »
While I can appreciate the value of vocabulary lists to get a quick sample of words in a specific area (and have made quite a few myself), there is also something to be said for focused posts on a single word, where spending time giving more explanation and examples can help better remember and understand… Read More »
Statistics about the number of people reading this blog are a good confidence booster, but readers who interact directly with me are really the lifeblood of Self Taught Japanese. That’s why I do my best to answer all questions that I receive via comments or email, sometimes in the form of long articles. Earlier this… Read More »
Words generally have an explicit meaning (what it says in the dictionary) in addition to an implicit meaning, also called the nuance or atmosphere of the word. When learning a foreign language it is good to understand both, and sometimes there is much more to the nuance than the explicit meaning. “Meccha” (generally written in… Read More »
When learning a foreign language, words can be grouped into two categories: those that map easily to some word in the speaker’s native language, or those that do not. The latter are, of course, generally more difficult to master. From a translation perspective, words in the second category are also often more difficult to translate,… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over the word “nite”, which is generally written in hiragana as にて. While one of my Japanese/Japanese dictionaries has a full six meanings for this word, fortunately in modern Japanese the use is somewhat limited and easy to understand. “nite” is classified as a “case particle” (格助詞), which… Read More »