As most people who have studied a little Japanese know, じゃない is an expression in Japanese that means “is/are not” and is be the opposite of だ (the copula, or “is”). In this post I’ll go over a few different ways to use じゃない. (じゃない happens to be an abbreviation of “ではない”, though that isn’t related… Read More »
Studying a foreign language, there are many times when you get stuck and just don’t know what to say. Sure, you can just mutter a “ちょっと待って” (wait) and clam up for a few seconds to think, but that would set you apart from what a native would do in similar circumstances. It’s best to give… 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 »
I’ve decided to create an email account for anyone who would like to contact me personally. Blogging is great but there are times you want to send a message to someone directly, and privately, without having to comment on one of their blog posts, and WordPress doesn’t support this. I’m open to questions on 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 »
「そう」 is a very simple word in Japanese that is used extremely often for a variety of situations. It’s meaning is similar to the English “so”, as in the sentence “I told you so”. It’s a mix of the concepts “that” and “true”. This word is commonly used as a light acknowledgement to a question.… Read More »
(Update: Six years later I’ve written another post on this topic, reviewing some of the same areas and adding new content as well. You can find it here.) It’s well known to anyone who has studied Japanese seriously that the language lacks a general concept of plurality, like English’s “-s”. However, there are some cases… Read More »
In a recent post I commented how bad of an idea it is to use English subtitles when watching Japanese TV shows. When doing so, your brain gets lazy and stops trying to process the stream of Japanese, or at least reduces focus on it. Having said that, there is a way to use subtitles… Read More »