In a recent post I discussed how I had seen a phrase “Advilがありますか?” (“Advil ga arimasus ka?”) in a book, and upon further research confirmed it was not a natural usage of the particle “ga”. I had posted to Oshiete Goo and received an excellent response which discussed why it was unnatural. Since then, I’ve… Read More »
When studying a foreign language, I’ve had all sorts of small revelations about how language works, and these are one of the things that keeps me motivated to learn even more. I remember in my first foreign language class, which happened to be for Spanish, the teacher said that “someone just didn’t sit on a hill… Read More »
From a grammar point of view, Japanese has several aspects that make it easy to learn including only a handful of tenses and relatively simple conjugations (the subject type is not used to determine the verbs conjugation like in some languages). On the other hand, there are a few areas where a student has to put… Read More »
This is the first of a series of articles about expressing various emotions in Japanese. When trying to learn how to talk about happiness in Japanese, it is important to understand that this word has different meanings in English and each of these translates to a different word or phrase. When you want to express the momentary… Read More »
In this post I’m going to go over the Japanese particle “さ” (sa) and a few related words. さ is something that took me quite some time to understand, partially because it wasn’t emphasized in any of the textbooks I originally learned Japanese from. I understand authors deciding to avoid this word because it not used very… Read More »
According to a poll I’ve been running since August 2014, the number one thing people would like more from this blog is information about Japanese Grammar. Writing about grammar is tricky since there are are many good books and websites about it, and I like to try and avoid duplicating content that is available elsewhere. So… Read More »
The Japanese word “なし” (romaji: “nashi”, Kanji: “無し”) is one that I have come across now and then, but really didn’t have a thorough understanding of. So I decided to do some research and in this post I’ll report my results. (Note: I am not talking about 梨 (nashi), which means ‘pear’). “なし” has a… Read More »
Studying a foreign language never gets old because you always have new things to learn. In Japanese, once you put in the time and effort to learn the grammar and a good chunk of the Kanji characters, you’ll get to a point where you can start reading native-level Japanese little by little. But there will always… Read More »
In Japanese, the expressions “にある” (ni aru) and “になっている” (ni natte iru) are used to express the state of something. “にある” is often used with words like 状態 (joutai, “state”), 状況 (joukyou, “state”) or 傾向 (keikou, “trend). Take this example sentence: 体は睡眠状態にある。 The body is in a state of sleep. Here you can think of this… 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 »