Once you get to the point in your foreign language studies where you are able to start having frequent conversations, you’ll probably start to notice times where the person you are speaking with has difficulty understanding what you are saying. Rather than say “I don’t understand you”, they may be more indirect and try and… Read More »
Tuttle Publishing offered me the opportunity to provide an early review of Florent Chavouet’s travel guide, titled “Manabeshima Island Japan”, and I jumped at the chance. After all, the book wasn’t coming out until Dec 1, 2015, and it’s funny subtitle of “One island, two months, one minicar, sixty crabs, eight bites, and fifty shots of shochu” had… Read More »
As I recently posted about, I’m starting a new series where I give a dialog in Japanese followed by one or more questions to test your understanding. This is the first post of that series, and is Level 1, which is the easiest level and targets those who have only studied Japanese a few months… Read More »
In Japanese, when you want to express that you wish for something, you can use the following pattern: Noun or Na-adjective + だといい Verb (in dictionary form or potential form) + といい For example, 優しい人だといいね。 [Yasashii hito da to ii ne] I hope he/she is nice person. みつかるといい [Mitsukaru to ii] I hope you find it. (literally:… Read More »
The other day I was reading some posts about Japanese on Twitter and came across a post that had a simple phrase written in English, and then translated into Japanese. Here is what it said: Hey, did you lose weight? あれ？やせた？ [Are? Yaseta?] At first, this looks like a pretty innocuous phrase. Both the English… 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 »
In a recent post of mine about suggestions for increasing reading speed in a foreign language, a reader commented about how using parallel texts in two languages (your native language and the one you are studying) is another helpful technique. Surely, using parallel texts is a valuable tool, and it’s pretty easy to do this by… Read More »
Thanks to the Internet, a person studying a foreign language without a formal study program can look up answers to the many questions they will surely have along the way. One place where your typical internet searching doesn’t work too well is matters of pronunciation, since it’s hard to convey sounds using just text. There… Read More »
In a Japanese novel I am reading I recently came across the following phrase where 分からない was used in a strange way that caught me off guard. The dialog went something like this: 探したんだけど、わからない。[Sagashita n da kedo, wakaranai] The context here the person speaking was searching for a friend who had been lost in the forest.… Read More »
I have an interest in learning the origins of various Japanese words, which is funny since I couldn’t care less for the origins of words in my native language, English. I don’t think it’s for the sake of history, since memorizing arbitrary facts puts me to sleep, and it’s not for utility since the origin… Read More »