In previous posts I talked about a few theories about why Japanese has so many loanwords, especially from English. This time I’d like to discuss some of the specific words themselves. Once the Katakana alphabet is learned, loanwords become a great help as many of them can be understood by English-speakers by simply sounding them out without having to… Read More »
A friend of mine told me he had heard of someone who was making an attempt to read one novel from each country in the world. This sounded like a pretty fun project, but of course my first instinct was to ask “so which novel was picked for Japan?” The answer to this question was… Read More »
Japanese has two verb types, consonant (godan) verbs and vowel (ichidan) verbs, each with their corresponding conjugations. Here is an example of each with conjugation into the past and -masu forms. Vowel (ichidan) 食べる (taberu) – to eat Past: 食べた (tabeta) ~Masu (polite): 食べます (tabemasu) Consonant verb (godan) 分かる (wakaru) – to understand Past: 分かった… Read More »
In Japanese there are many verbs which can be as a suffix to another verb in order to enhance the other verb’s meaning. The verb which is being enhanced comes first and is always in the pre-masu form (i.e. たべる→たべ or のむ→のみ). The suffix which does the modification can be conjugated like a normal verb… Read More »
Back when I first started studying Japanese, I wasn’t aware of any translation programs that worked between English and Japanese, and if there was I’m pretty sure they were very expensive and not very commonly used. Nowadays we have things like Google Translate, a free service that translates between over 50 world languages, including Japanese. As… Read More »
I’ve released my 3rd Japanese quiz, this time on transitive/intransitive verbs. Take it here: testmoz.com/458663 Here are the details: Quiz Topic: Differentiating between Japanese transitive / intransitive verbs: Number of questions: 10 Question style: Multiple choice – each question has two verb, one intransitive verb and one transitive verb. Some of the verbs are conjugated. Required… Read More »
Japanese has a very complex system of politeness which is often claimed to be one of the reasons it’s so difficult to master, and I completely agree on this point. Depending on the relationship between you and the person/people you are speaking with, you will use variations on certain words, or even entirely different expressions. You have to… Read More »
I first heard about this movie a few months ago (it debuted last November in theaters) as a CG-animated film which was heavily influenced by Japanese culture. Being a fan of both CG and Japanese culture, I had to see it, although I waited until it came out on Blue Ray last month. The story… Read More »
The way I learned Japanese conjugations for the potential form of “eru/iru” verbs was to remove the stem and add ~られる。All other verbs involve removing only the last character and then adding a character with the same consonant, but with a え sound, (for example く would change to け ) followed by a る. Potential (可能)… Read More »
In this post I’d like to look at the particle combination で＋は = では (pronounced ‘de wa’) and the related word じゃ (ja). To a certain extent, the various usages of “では”can be understood by taking a sum of the usages of で and は when used separately, but in some cases thinking in this… Read More »