water – Self Taught Japanese

Japanese Expression Highlight: 「水を得た魚」(mizu wo eta sakana)

The other day when I was working away at writing a new blog post, I was told: 君、水を得た魚だね (kimi, mizu wo eta sakana da ne) I admit I was a little confused when I hard this. So what does it mean? First, let’s look at the words one by one: 水 (mizu): water 得た (eta):… Read More »

お湯: when “hot water” isn’t water

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 »