As I’ve said in several other posts, Japanese dramas are a great source for learning conversation skills, including common expressions and vocabulary. However, depending on the drama, there will be more or less coverage of stuff that you would actually be able to use yourself. For example, a drama where the main character is a… Read More »
In my second mini quiz (Japanese particles で and に), there was one question which was answered incorrectly more than half the time, so I’d like to review it in this post. (If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, you can do so here: testmoz.com/450945) The problem goes like this: 今晩、床「 」寝る 今晩：こんばん tonight 床：ゆか floor… Read More »
I got feedback from one of my readers that sometimes differentiating between で and に can be difficult, so I made a mini 8-question quiz to test everyone’s knowledge in this area. You can take it here: testmoz.com/450945 If you’d like to review before the test, you can see this post of mine which goes over the… Read More »
In Japanese, using polite speech properly is an important part of becoming fluent, and many textbooks or classes introduce the です／ます forms (ex: たべます）from day one. This is especially important because many of the people you speak Japanese with might be people you have met for the first time, for example if you stop people on the… Read More »
For my short quiz on Japanese particles, there was one question which was not answered correctly nearly half the time. In this article I’d like to go over that problem which appeared as #3 in the quiz. (For those who want to take the quiz before reading the answer and explanation, you can do so here: testmoz.com/449328)… Read More »
This time I’d like to focus on the volitional form in Japanese which an important pattern often used in both written and spoken speech. Many times I have seen this form introduced to beginner students of Japanese as meaning “Let’s …”, and while this is one of the common usages there are several more. I first… Read More »
Thanks to all who have taken my first test on basic particle usage in Japanese. I was looking through it again and realized that question #7 had the wrong answer (I had は but it should be が). I had went over the test twice before publishing it, and not sure how that error got… Read More »
(Update: I liked making particle quizzes so much I made a whole book of them, you can read all about it here) Writing posts about Japanese is fun and all, but one of the reasons I started this blog was because I like teaching, and have had some experience myself teaching a different topic at… Read More »
The progressive tense, which involves a 〜て form of a verb plus いる (ex: 食べている) is very convenient for English-speakers learning Japanese since it has similarities to the “-ing” form (ex: “I am eating”). This usage means something is actively ongoing. This is all well and good, but the fact is that there is a… Read More »
Often when learning a foreign language, one has to not only learn verbs and nouns, but also natural combinations of the two which make expressions. For example, let’s take the following English sentence. Yesterday I had a good dream. If we were to translate this word-by-word to Japanese (shifting around words for correct word ordering),… Read More »