All human-made languages are built from rules, upon which are piled on exception after exception (at least in the languages I have studied). In this post I’d like to go over a confusing usage of a Japanese particle that I’ve stumbled across in my own speech several times. What particle do you think fits in the… Read More »
While trying to organize things around the house lately, I found a bunch of novels from the famous author Keigo Higashino, known for his “Galileo” series of novels which was made into a movie, as well as many others (like 白夜行) I have around 49 novels from this great author which I’m looking to sell in bulk,… Read More »
The Japanese character 上 has a basic meaning of “up” or “above”, and is pronounced “ue” when written by itself. In Kanji compounds, it is often pronounced as “uwa” (上着, uwagi) or “jou” (上陸, jouriku). “上” does have some other usages, and this time I’d like to discuss the expression “〜上で”. This can be used to… Read More »
The Japanese word いい (also 良い or よい), roughly translated as “good,” has a variety of uses making it a “good” word indeed. It can be used to mean something that is morally “good,” of good quality, or sufficient in some way. In this post I’ll go through a bunch of ways to use this… Read More »
なる is one of those super useful Japanese verbs that has many common uses, even for beginners to the language. This verb generally means “to become” and is used in the following pattern: [object] が [condition] に なる where the [object] here will become (turn into, change into, progress into) the [condition]. Let’s start with… Read More »
Have you ever thought to yourself, “If I could only live in Japan, I’d become fluent in Japanese in no time”? If you’re struggling to learn this monster of a language, especially self-taught, then you likely have at least once. There is no doubt about it, living in a country whose native language is one… Read More »
In this post I’ve decided to list a few of the commonly used colloquial abbreviations and transformations in Japanese. Keep in mind that many of these are slang/informal (くだけた言い方）and would typically only be used in conversation with someone you are close to, or very informal writing like a blog. This list isn’t complete and I’m… Read More »
As I mentioned in a previous article, in my initial years of studying Japanese I made a huge emphasis on learning as much grammar as I could. For me, one of the most difficult elements of Japanese grammar is distinguishing between the particles は and が. There are surely hundreds of books and websites that describe… Read More »
This time we’ll learn some age-related expressions in Japanese. Age is dealt with a little differently compared to English so it’s good to make sure you have the basics down. The simplest way to say “age” is とし（年）which also means “year”. Here are two common expressions when asking age (remember いくつ means “how many”): お年、いくつですか？… Read More »
All through my Japanese studies I have always dedicated a large portion of time to learning grammar, almost to the extent that I would call it “grammar-driven learning”. Of course it’s great to have a rich vocabulary, but without knowing the rules for how to transform and combine words to get across your intended meaning,… Read More »