Tag Archives: meaning

Japanese loanword spotlight: 「ナーバス」(naabasu) [It doesn’t always mean “nervous”]

Loanwords from other countries, called gairaigo (外来語), make up a significant part of the Japanese language, and learning their nuances is a key part of being truly fluent in Japanese. Many of these words, for example seetaa(セーター, meaning “sweater”), are used in a way that is very similar to their original language. However, some loan words have… Read More »

Japanese phrase “mou hitotsu” (もうひとつ)and a brief Murakami translation

Recently I was reading an interesting blog which contains reviews of Japanese books (in English), and I came across an article about the Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) book “After Dark”. While I am not going to go into that book in detail in this post, in the the article I found there was a short passage… Read More »

Language Learning Trip: think meaning, not words

When studying your first foreign language, there are many things you have to get accustomed to: new sounds, different characters, and grammar rules, to mention only a few. During this process, the longer you study, the more tricks you pick up to help speed your journey towards fluency. One such trick I’ve learned is to think in terms… Read More »