Go is a two-player board game which originated in China over 2,500 years ago, and is now popular in other countries including Japan and Korea. In Japanese it is written as “囲碁” (“igo”). The game board contains a grid which is typically 19×19, though sometimes smaller sized grids are used for beginners (9×9 or 13×13).… Read More »
The Japanese particle で is one of the first particles that is typically taught, because it’s usage to mean where an action takes place, or “by means of” is pretty easy to understand. Here is one example of each: 僕は部屋でテレビを見た。 I watched TV in the room. 僕たち、バスで海に行った。 We went to the beach via bus. One… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over the meaning and uses of the Japanese phrase “として”. Although it mean seem like this is the combination of the particles ”と” and “して”, the meaning of “として” isn’t the same as simply combining the meaning of these two. So I suggest you think of this a complete… Read More »
Since my last article on Japanese expressions about food got a few likes, I thought I would write a follow-up one with a few more expressions. 腹持ち (haramochi) This expression is used to refer to how well something keeps in the stomach (i.e. how long it takes to digest), and is usually used in the… Read More »
It’s pretty well known that the Japanese are very particular about food, which reflects on everything from cleanliness in restaurants, the difficult training required to become a chef in a restaurant, and of course the taste itself of the food. After all, the fifth basic taste, umami or savory, was discovered partially with the help of… Read More »
In the last few years, the frequency that I see movies has dropped considerably, so in order for me to rematch a movie it has to be pretty darn good. Mamoru Hosada’s “Summer Wars”, released in 2009, is one such film which I immensely enjoyed the second time around. I had alluded to this movie in… Read More »
This time I’m going to talk about the Japanese word 後 (“あと”), as well as compounds which contain 後, where it can be pronounced “あと”, “ご”, or “こう”. I’ll start off with a useful phrase – “後で”. This matches pretty closely to English’s “later” and refers to the future in a vague sense. 後でブログを読んでね。 Check out… Read More »
When you switch to another language and culture, there are many different things you have to get used to: pronunciation, written script, and customs, among others. But math is one thing that you normally would expect things to be mostly the same, since after all numbers are generally universal, including notation for equations and such.… Read More »
The Japanese verb 切る, pronounced “kiru”, is one of the verbs typically introduced in basic level Japanese textbooks. This is because it is an example of verb that end sin ‘iru’ but is conjugated as a constant verb, and also because it’s easy to understand conceptually. In this post I’ll show some related uses of… Read More »
I’ve written before about how it’s hard to grasp a word’s true meaning and usages just by looking it’s dictionary entry. There are often subtle nuances or assumptions missing. This time I’d like to talk about one such case. 湯 (“yu”, sometimes written as お湯, “oyu”) is a word which means “hot water”. I had… Read More »