Japanese verbs, a core part of the language, are relatively straightforward in terms of how they are structured (most end with a “u” sound, i.e. “taberu”, “kau”, “oyogu”, etc.) and how they are conjugated (unlike English verbs, 99.9% of verbs in Japanese follow a set of clear rules). Knowing how to understand and effectively use… Read More »
I’m announcing the release of the first few stories of a science fiction novel I have started writing and publishing on Amazon Vella.
Learning useful day-to-day expressions is often one of the first priorities of a student of a foreign language, and being able to express being hungry (something which should happen to everyone daily) is pretty high on that list. The typical way we learn to express hunger is お腹が空く (onaka ga suku), which literally means “the… Read More »
In this post I respond to a reader’s comment about why the terms “uke” and “nage” are used in Aikido.
In this post I want to go over a Japanese expression that builds on a few fundamental grammar aspects to make an interesting result. The expression can be described in generic form as 〜してもしきれない (~shite mo shikirenai), but you can switch the “suru” verbs with any other verb. First, let’s look an example: この染み、拭いても拭ききれない (kono… Read More »
I’m proud to announce the release my first anthology of Japanese literature containing a diverse set of stories from several authors, published in parallel English/Japanese for Japanese learners.
Sometimes when I see a thread flying by on Twitter and feel strongly towards the subject matter I will consider chiming in, but the problem is that trying to present a proper counter-argument on Twitter can be tricky. Sure, you can use a bunch of Tweets, but it gets hard to read, and also directly… Read More »
When learning a foreign language, generally everyone starts with basic sentences with only a few words, and then moves their way up from there. But often making the jump from 5-word sentences to 5-line sentences can be difficult, so language learners can sometimes fall back to using a bunch of little sentences (which is OK… Read More »
I’m happy to announce “Gensen”, a new place to read Japanese literature in a serialized form, much like a digital literary magazine. To start with I have published “Cactus Rose” and “Acala the Immovable”, fiction pieces that I highly recommend.
In this post I would like to go over the casual expression あるある (aru aru), which doesn’t have a literal parallel in English. I will also talk a little about where it is derived from. To give some context first to how you might see this phrase used, imagine an article titled “テレワークあるある” (terewaaku aru… Read More »