「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 »
Japanese has several words which contain opposing meanings and these can be tricky to understand at first. As always, the key to unlocking their meaning is context. I’ll discuss these with examples of both opposing meanings. やっぱり (Yappari, also written as やはり or abbreviated as やっぱ) This word is more frequently written using hiragana, but learning… 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 »
も is one of the first particles that is typically taught, and with good reason. Not only does it have a variety of common uses, but they tend to be pretty easy to understand and use, unlike は／が which take considerably more time to master. Just make sure you don’t confuse も with もう (already),… Read More »
If you look up the word “わり”（割）in a dictionary (see here), you’ll find several different meanings and expressions. In this post I’d like to focus on a few which I use frequently in the hopes you’ll make some use out of them yourself. Each of these are related to the basic meaning of わり, which… Read More »
When studying a foreign language, we have no choice but to resort to dictionaries time and time again to help comprehend new words and search for ways to express ourselves more effectively. Having said that,after many years of using dictionaries as a reference, I’ve learned to not over rely on them, sometimes even going as… Read More »
In the flow of a conversation, there are many times when we will make a brief interjection such as “oh really?” or “is that so?” in response to something the other party said. These are typically not used to express any deep meaning, but rather simply to indicate that we are listening and understanding what… Read More »
Mastering Japanese verbs so that you can use and understand them fluently requires a good grasp of the concept of transitive vs. intransitive verbs. Transitive verbs are those which perform an action on an object (i.e. つける、たてる). You can think of these as “targeted”. The object is typically specified using the particle を。 On the… Read More »