In one of my other blog posts, I mentioned how watching subtitles when studying a foreign language is a bad idea because your brain stops paying attention to the details of the language and takes the easy route to comprehension. There’s actually another major reason to avoid subtitles which I’ve decided to devote this post… Read More »
The Japanese word いい (also 良い or よい), roughly translated as “good,” has a variety of uses making it a “good” word indeed. It can be used to mean something that is morally “good,” of good quality, or sufficient in some way. In this post I’ll go through a bunch of ways to use this… Read More »
Normally I try to stay away from writing about pronunciation too much on a text blog – after all using words you can only say so much about how things sound. Some things are best learned in person, or at least with an audio blog or podcast (which I may try to do someday). But… Read More »
でしょう is one word I remember reading about in a Japanese textbook and not quite grasping it’s meaning immediately. だろう is it’s less-polite counterpart but to simplify things I’ll be focusing on でしょう for most of this article. I’ll try to explain their usage and nuances in as simple a way as possible, without resorting to any… Read More »
Many of the Japanese particles are not easily understood by foreigners studying the language, but fortunately there are a few that are quite simple to grasp and use. か、sometimes called the question particle, is one of these (along with も). As you might expect, this particle is sometimes used when asking a question. It is… Read More »
I recently wrote a post on usages of ‘そう’ coupled with a few particles, and I decided to write a second article with a few other things I thought of on this subject. In that post I mentioned the phrases そうだね and そうだよ, but what if you remove the だ from these? Well, the word… Read More »
When studying any foreign language, there are many things one has to learn and grow accustomed to: pronunciation, grammar, and characters, to name a few. In my study of Japanese I feel that I have a fairly good grasp of many of these things, not necessarily to the degree of what I would call ‘fluent’,… Read More »
Japanese has several words which contain opposing meanings and these can be tricky to understand at first. As always, the key to unlocking their meaning is context. I’ll discuss these with examples of both opposing meanings. やっぱり (Yappari, also written as やはり or abbreviated as やっぱ) This word is more frequently written using hiragana, but learning… Read More »
Loanwords, or those borrowed from another language (外来語), are used very frequently in Japanese. Those originating from English words are especially common, and this is a boon for all us studying this very challenging language. A majority of these can be understood with a glance, and are easy to remember as well. However there is… Read More »
When studying a foreign language, we have no choice but to resort to dictionaries time and time again to help comprehend new words and search for ways to express ourselves more effectively. Having said that,after many years of using dictionaries as a reference, I’ve learned to not over rely on them, sometimes even going as… Read More »