This is another post in my Read & Answer series of articles where I give a short passage in Japanese followed by one or more questions to test your understanding. Besides testing vocabulary, articles in this series aim to test reading comprehension (読解力, dokkairoyku). You can see more about this series here, and a list… Read More »
I’m always surprised by the diversity of language and how vocabulary words tend to group into what I call “domains”. For example, many terms you read in an economic newspaper are not likely to pop up in everyday conversation, and slang words you hear on the street are not too likely be used in a… Read More »
We recently heard from a friend about a new Japanese restaurant in download Portland called Kuu, which is a word that means “to eat” in Japanese (it has somewhat of a rough feel to it, so I recommend using the more common taberu in most situation). The restaurant opened at 11:00 a.m., and as we… Read More »
Whereas many of this blog’s posts are about Japanese words that I use myself in daily life, in this article I’d like to talk about a word that I had some difficulty understanding and the research I did related to that. The word is 実務 (jitsumu) and I saw it used in the name of… Read More »
I’m sure many people are working full time for a company that they don’t own any part of, getting paid on a periodic rate based on a set contract. And I’m also willing to bet that a good portion of those people wish they could go independent and become their own boss, choosing what and… Read More »
In this post I’d like to talk about nothing. No, I’m not trying to be nostalgic about the hit comedy show Seinfield from the 90s––I’m trying to describe the Japanese word “mu” (often written in kanji as 無), which essentially means “nothing”. Unlike many of the words I talk about in this blog, the word… Read More »
As you’ve probably already discovered, Japanese has a huge number of loanwords, especially from English––and that number seems to be increasing fast. Fortunately, a majority of these can be guessed from context if you can manage to match them up to their original word by sound. But some of them are hard to guess because… Read More »
Recently I announced the release of my latest ebook, “Tales of the Disturbed”, a collection of short stories I have translated from the classic Japanese author Yoshio Toyoshima (豊島与志雄). As part of the editing process I was reading parts of the stories out loud, and after doing this for a while I realized that it… Read More »
(Note: As of April 2021, it was confirmed with ReadNihon’s creator that the site has been shut down. This article will be left for some time for historical reasons.) Recently the creator of the new website ReadNihon, designed to help you learn grammar and vocabulary by reading Japanese text, contacted me and requested I check… Read More »
In Japanese, there are many transitive/intransitive verb pairs, whereas in English we use often word order to describe whether an action is transitive or intransitive. Masting these pairs is an important step in becoming fluent in Japanese. As a simple example, let’s take つける (tsukeru), a transitive verb with a bunch of meanings, but for… Read More »