In a previous post, I’ve discussed how Japanese has less curse words than languages like English. There are a few, however, which can pack quite a strong meaning, and in this post I’ll be talking about one such word – “yabai”. “yabai” originally means “dangerous” (equivalent to Japanese “abunai”) or a bad situation. 警察はやばい仕事です。 Police officer is a… Read More »
For today’s post I’d like to focus on the Japanese expression “kke” (っけ) which is typically used at the end of a sentence, and signifies that the speaker/writer is trying to remember something. For example: 今日は何曜日だっけ？ What day of the week was it again? This expression can be used when you are talking to yourself in an… Read More »
Translation of text from one language into another, in particular of a novel or short story, has been an interest of mine for quite a long time. It’s my belief that to be a superb translator, one has to have been brought up speaking both languages, or at least spent 5-10 years in a country… Read More »
Japanese pitch accent (something I’ve written about before) is tricky because each word has a different combination of up and down pitches, and sometimes the accent of one word can affect a word immediately after it. To make things even more complicated, different regional dialects of Japanese have very different patterns of accents – for example… Read More »
Being really into the grammar aspect of languages, when I first began studying Japanese I read any grammar-related book I could get my hands on. Particles, little words that pack a great deal of meaning, are integral to Japanese and also alot of fun to learn. Usually one starts with something simple like “を” (‘wo’,… Read More »
Although I would bet there are many people who haven’t heard the term “sequential voicing” or “連濁” before, the basic concept of it is quite easy to learn, and will help you better guess the meaning of certain words plus make remembering them easier. First a little terminology. When writing in Katakana or Hiragana there… Read More »
One thing that can be a bit challenging about learning Japanese is its system for counting items. In this post I’ll go over that and give some related resources. The basic formula for using counters is pretty simple. If you have something you want to count you use a combination of the numeral (いち、に、さん, etc.)… Read More »
In a previous blog post I discussed how the element of necessity makes the brain more active in the learning process, increasing retention and understanding of foreign language. One little trick I discovered is that if you are planning on giving a summary to someone about some media you are consuming (article, podcast, movie, etc.)… Read More »
When creating my language learning website Language on Track, I wanted to add some other features in addition to goal tracking to really make it a nice set of tools to help study foreign languages. The one part of LOT that I likely spent the most time on and am the most proud of is… Read More »
This expression is an interesting one, which I’ve seen used in a unique way in both real life and in a Japanese movie. The original meaning is pretty easy to guess – it’s the term for when passing a baton on in a relay race from one runner to the next. However the meaning has… Read More »