I’ve dedicated a great deal of my time to having a good understanding of Japanese grammar, and proper usage of the particles “wa” and “ga” is one of the tricker areas. I’ve written some posts on this topic, and you can find many others if you google around. I am not going to go into a… Read More »
In this post I’d like to discuss a grammar construct that I had not explicitly learned into fairly late in my Japanese studies. I saw it used often but until I researched it I didn’t understand it completely. The pattern is “[noun] + ga suru”. First, before we talk about the combination of “ga” and… Read More »
Recently I read the very enjoyable short story “麦本三歩は今日が好き” by 住野よる in the literary magazine 小説幻冬 (Dec 2016 edition). I even translated a short excerpt of it into English here. There was one line of the story whose grammar I just couldn’t figure out, and I thought that it was either some strange pattern I had never… Read More »
The Japanese particle “wa” in Japanese (written “は”) is a fundamental part of the language and is used very frequently, although it can difficult for students to learn since there is no direct parallel in English (see my blog post on “wa” and “ga”). To give a quick summary, this particle is used to establish the topic… 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 »