Not sure if anyone has noticed, but I’ve stopped posting for quite some time, having been busy with work and just life in general. I tend to get focus most of my free time and effort on one or two things at a time, and that energy has been sucked up by other tasks lately.… Read More »
This book I picked up at the same time as 影の現象学, and the two works are similar in that I misunderstood both to be fiction when in fact they were nonfiction academic books. This book is a collection of short essays from the mathematician and popular essayist Masahiko Fujiwara, whose parents were also popular authors.… Read More »
For this post I’ve chosen three Japanese verbs which I think will be very useful for the beginner Japanese student. All of them relate to thought and/or memory in some way. 覚える (oboeru）is a verb which can be used to mean ‘to learn’, or ‘to remember’, depending on the context. One of the most common ways… Read More »
The path of learning a foreign language, especially when self-taught, is fraught with many challenges and difficulties, and one should always expect a minimum of several years for any reasonable level of fluency. Fortunately, all the hard work is (eventually) rewarded with satisfaction in this great achievement, better appreciation of another country’s culture, and increased opportunities for careers… Read More »
If I had to make a list of the top ten most useful words in Japanese, I might very well pick ちょっと as one of them. Not only is it short and easy to say, but it’s meanings are easy to learn and use in everyday conversation. ちょっと’s basic, most fundamental meaning is “a little”, and it’s… Read More »
One frustrating thing about learning foreign languages is that many aspects of language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.) can appear to be random or arbitrary. I remember when learning Spanish my teacher used to respond to such comments by saying “One day, a long long time ago, there was a man who sat on a hill and decided… Read More »
In a recent poll of mine there was many responders who said they wanted to learn more about Japanese grammar from this blog. While there are many sites and books out there that have a great deal of useful information about Japanese grammar, I thought I would write a post that looks at grammar from… Read More »
Color words in Japanese exist in two different forms: i-adjectives and nouns. Some of them are present in only one form (usually the noun form), but many are present in both. I’ll present a list of basic colors along with the different forms that color exists as, with the i-adjective form first (if present). Red:… Read More »
The other day I heard from someone that they were having difficulty learning to read Japanese, such that they had to re-read passages several times over to fully grasp the meaning, and generally had trouble thinking in Japanese when reading. This is a difficult problem indeed, one I have faced for many years myself. I have… Read More »
It’s time for one of those posts which I rarely do – one where I focus on a single word. This time not only is it a single word, but a single character and single sound. “し” can mean everything from poetry (詩) to death (死), but in this case I’m referring to neither. Rather… Read More »