I’ve written before about how it’s hard to grasp a word’s true meaning and usages just by looking it’s dictionary entry. There are often subtle nuances or assumptions missing. This time I’d like to talk about one such case. 湯 (“yu”, sometimes written as お湯, “oyu”) is a word which means “hot water”. I had… Read More »
When learning a foreign language, once you learn the basics you should always strive to be humble and never assume you have a perfect understanding. This reminds me of the expression “油断大敵” (yudan taiteki) which translates to something like “careless is your worst enemy”. In other words, letting your guard down for just a moment… Read More »
This time I’d like to talk about a few uses of the Japanese verb 限る (kagiru), which means “to limit”. The first use is to mean “not necessarily”. Here is an example sentence. 美味しいとは限らない It’s not necessarily tasty Literally 限らない is close to “do not limit to”, but in this case the meaning matches up… Read More »
In this post I’d like to review some of the ways to represent “truth” in Japanese, and as you’ll see there are quite a few. The most common one to know for everyday conversation is 本当 (hontou). This can be used as an adjective or as an adverb. In the latter case に is often added.… 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 »
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 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 »
The Japanese word “大変” (taihen), made out of the characters for “large” and “change”, and is typically used for two related meanings which I will go over in this post, along with example sentences. The first is to express something is extreme, and can roughly match with english “very” or “terribly”. When using it as an… Read More »
The Japanese term “調子” is quite a multifaceted word with seven definitions in the dictionary, as well as a handful of expressions and compound words that use it. In this post I’ll talk about the usages of it that I have heard most, and I feel are most likely to be useful. The primary definitions for… 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 »