kara – Self Taught Japanese

Japanese Grammar: Using kara (から) and node (ので) to express a reason in isolation

As I’ve written about before, in Japanese oftentimes words or entire phrases can be omitted, even more so than in English. I’d like to talk about another case where things can be omitted in Japanese, but first I want to give a quick summary of talking about reasons in Japanese. Expressing a reason is pretty straightforward and typically… Read More »

A tale of two Japanese “because” words: “node” (ので）vs “kara” （から）

Recently one of my readers asked about the difference between the Japanese expressions “node” (ので）and “kara” (から), so in this post I’ll go over that. Both of these words are roughly equivalent to the English “because” when used in the following patterns: [dictionary form verb/i-adjective] + から (ex: 食べるから、寒いから) [noun/na-adjective]… Read More »