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 »
We live in a day and age where recording aspects of our daily life as numbers, and analyzing that data, has become more and more commonplace. To give a few examples: we measure how many steps we walked, how long we brushed our teeth, how much we drank, how many times we smoked, how long… 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »