In a previous post, I’ve discussed how Japanese has less curse words than languages like English. There are a few, however, which can pack quite a strong meaning, and in this post I’ll be talking about one such word – “yabai”. “yabai” originally means “dangerous” (equivalent to Japanese “abunai”) or a bad situation. 警察はやばい仕事です。 Police officer is a… Read More »
For this post I’ve decided to create a vocabulary list for scientific terms in Japanese. I’m personally interested in science and enjoy trying to read Japanese magazines and books written about science, and I hope this list inspires some of you to try out the same. I will try to stay to pretty general terms… Read More »
The other day I read a fellow blogger’s review of the book “Fluent in 3 months” (which you can see here), and that got me thinking about what foreign language fluency really is. If I did an online search I’m sure I could find hundreds of explanations, but I decided to take a different angle and… Read More »
One frustrating thing about learning foreign languages is that many aspects of language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.) can appear to be random or arbitrary. I remember when learning Spanish my teacher used to respond to such comments by saying “One day, a long long time ago, there was a man who sat on a hill and decided… Read More »
Succeeding in learning a foreign language, especially one very different from your native tongue, requires many traits: a good memory, time management, the ability to experiment and learn to pronounce foreign sounds, listening skills, and an analytical ability to comprehend and use various grammatical constructions. But there is one critical trait that is often overlooked… Read More »
As most of you studying Japanese probably know, the language has to types of adjectives: Na-adjectives (i.e. 素敵(な)）and I-adjectives (i.e. 大きい). Each of these has different rules for conjugation into various forms. There is a few words in Japanese that look like Na-adjectives that derived from a I-adjective. Here is a list of a few… Read More »
This is my first post in a series containing Japanese vocabulary lists on different topics. If you enjoy it, please like it and comment if you have any suggested topic your want me to write up vocabulary lists for. A great many people have gotten into Japanese via anime or manga. Another way is through… Read More »
The effectiveness of foreign language practice depends on part on how pressing of a need there is to communicate and understand correctly. When speaking with a native or fluent speaker of that language, there are all sorts of emotions that get engaged and one usually tries his or her hardest to comprehend and speak in… Read More »
The Japanese little tsu, written “っ” (for example in the word “行った”), represents a pause in the flow of sound when speaking. I’ve heard this mispronounced by beginners, and even by those with several months of experience under their belt, so I thought I would clarify any confusion about how it should be pronounced. The brief description… Read More »
“っぽい” is a very useful expression that has three main usages. Expressing the tendency to do something っぽい can be used to express the tendency or high chance of doing something, and is generally added to the end of a verb in the pre-masu form. Though you can try using it with any verb, initially you should… Read More »