Normally one doesn’t expect too much in the way of quality food in Airport restaurants, but I found one that was surprisingly good on a recent business trip. It’s called ‘Osho’, and is located in the San Francisco Airport. The name comes from ‘王将’ which is the name of the ‘King’ piece in Japanese chess… Read More »
Many of the Japanese particles are not easily understood by foreigners studying the language, but fortunately there are a few that are quite simple to grasp and use. か、sometimes called the question particle, is one of these (along with も). As you might expect, this particle is sometimes used when asking a question. It is… Read More »
As a self-studier of a foreign language with limited exposure to native speakers of that language, I try my best to take advantage of every opportunity that comes my way. Recently, I briefly met several Japanese businessmen at a conference on the west coast, and after speaking of business matters for a few minutes I… Read More »
In a previous post, I reviewed two of the few Japanese bookstore chains in the US: Book Off and Kinokuniya. On a recent business trip to San Jose, California, I found out there was a Kinokuniya nearby so I decided to stop by for a little while. The first thing that caught me off guard… Read More »
Foreign language study, which can take many hundreds of hours of study and practice, is anything but a joke. But keeping things light and not being afraid to attempt a joke here or an out-of-context line there is one of the keys to increased fluency. As I mentioned in this post, language is filled with… Read More »
I recently wrote a post on usages of ‘そう’ coupled with a few particles, and I decided to write a second article with a few other things I thought of on this subject. In that post I mentioned the phrases そうだね and そうだよ, but what if you remove the だ from these? Well, the word… Read More »
「そう」 is a very simple word in Japanese that is used extremely often for a variety of situations. It’s meaning is similar to the English “so”, as in the sentence “I told you so”. It’s a mix of the concepts “that” and “true”. This word is commonly used as a light acknowledgement to a question.… Read More »
Once someone who was informally teaching me Japanese mentioned that in Japanese there are not that many strong curse words in everyday language. If you watch certain anime or dramas you might occasionally catch overdramatic words like “ちくしょ!” (negative expletive, literally ‘beast’) or “きさま!” (second person pronoun used as an insult) but those are very… Read More »
(Update: Six years later I’ve written another post on this topic, reviewing some of the same areas and adding new content as well. You can find it here.) It’s well known to anyone who has studied Japanese seriously that the language lacks a general concept of plurality, like English’s “-s”. However, there are some cases… Read More »
When I started this blog, I promised myself I would first write 50 posts and then see how things went before I decided to continue or not. I managed this many posts in a little under two months, which translates to almost a post a day. This is actually my second WordPress blog (my first… Read More »