An embedded question is when a sentence contains a question inside of it, for example “I don’t know where Japan is”. Sentences with embedded questions can be declarative statements like that example, or instead can be questions themselves, as in “Do you know where Japan is?”. An example of a non-embedded question would be the… Read More »
In my last post here I talked about a modern first person pronoun in Japanese, “onara”. In the beginning of the post I alluded to the fact it was the first of the month, but in fact it was the first of April, which happens to be “April Fools Day” in America (I’m not sure… Read More »
(Please note, this post was an April fools joke.) As it’s now the first of the month, in this post I’d like to focus on a first-person pronoun I’ve been hearing alot lately. While modern English has pretty much only “I”, Japanese has many of these words including “boku”, “watashi”, “atashi”, and even “washi” (and that’s… Read More »
In Japanese, differences in position, experience, and age are considered very important and are built into the language itself in the form of words that indicate where someone is with respect to others. This concept is expressed in the terms 先輩 (senpai), which refers to someone older or with more experience, and 後輩 (kouhai), which… Read More »
In a previous post I’ve talked about the NHK Japanese podcasts, which are freely available online for a variety of programs. I’ve jumped around listening to a few of these, but lately have really gotten into one called “Oogiri corner” (大喜利コーナー）that is billed as “The earliest in Japan” (日本一早い) and is part of the “Suppin”… Read More »
As we all know, one of the best ways to learn a foreign language is immerse yourself in an environment where it is beneficial, even necessary to communicate in that language. One of the pitfalls of this type of situation is that there is always the chance of miscommunication, either because you make a mistake… Read More »
In Japanese, you can use the word 興味 (‘kyoumi’) to talk about interest in something. It is typically coupled with the が or は, plus the verb for inanimate existence, ある (‘aru’), or some derivation of it (negative form, polite form, etc.). Let’s start with a simple example: それは全然興味がありません。 I am not interested in that at… Read More »
In previous posts I talked about a few theories about why Japanese has so many loanwords, especially from English. This time I’d like to discuss some of the specific words themselves. Once the Katakana alphabet is learned, loanwords become a great help as many of them can be understood by English-speakers by simply sounding them out without having to… Read More »
When learning a foreign language, it’s usually assumed that in addition to spoken language studies (listening and speaking) there will be a focus placed on written language (reading and writing). At first you might think the only difference is learning characters vs sounds, but there is much more involved. As a result there are some differences in… Read More »
In Japanese there are many verbs which can be as a suffix to another verb in order to enhance the other verb’s meaning. The verb which is being enhanced comes first and is always in the pre-masu form (i.e. たべる→たべ or のむ→のみ). The suffix which does the modification can be conjugated like a normal verb… Read More »