Category Archives: Language
Can You Really Play in Japanese?
The word for “play” in Japanese does not necessarily have the same context in Japanese as it does in English.
In English when we think play we think, in general, we think games or sports. From tennis and golf to video games or mind games.
The word 遊ぶ (あそぶ) can mean up to three main things.
to play
to [...]
Guest Post over at Wide Island Review – Building Japanese Vocabulary
Learning words through context has the benefit of showing you when and how to use the word from the beginning, but it can take a lot of time to learn the words this way since you are learning more than one thing at a time.
Flash cards are a quick way to gain a lot of [...]
Japanese Verb Conjugation tai We have Hopes and Dreams
Everyone constantly wants something. Whether they want a hamburger or a new car, maybe even a pencil. In English we have the word want. We want things from objects or dreams to come true, and you probably want to know how to say in Japanese. Well fortunately this is super easy. Just add たい to [...]
Don’t do that with short forms
We often hit on doing stuff or requesting stuff be done, but sometimes there are just things you don’t want people to do. Like don’t eat the car. Not taking pictures in a museum.
To start be sure that you have reviewed short forms present tense. Because what you are going to do is add ～でください [...]
Short Form Japanese Verb Conjugation Past Tense
Past tense short forms are a bit more tricky than present tense short forms, but not by much. First though be sure that you understand te-forms, and by extension u and ru-verbs.
Past Affirmative
Just like present affirmative was easy since it was just dictionary form. Past tense is easy too. Since you should arleady know te-forms [...]
Help Save a Dying Language
If you know of a dying language and you know people that speak it who are trying to save that language. You should point them to the Rosetta Stone Endangered Language Program. I was poking around their site and noticed they have a program available to help save dying languages. This piqued my interest more [...]
Short Form Japanese Verb Conjugation Present Tense
Short forms seem kind of complicated when I first saw them and messed with them, but they aren’t, at all. If you just know the principles of it short forms are super simple. For present tense you don’t need to really review anything other than u-verb and ru-verb conjugation. The only thing to really know [...]
Japanese for Where Things Are
In another post we had a video on object placement. Today we are going to go beyond an objects relative position to the speaker and discuss relative position to other things or places. This is, after all, more well used, some examples might be:
The building to the right of the post office.
On top of the [...]
Adjective Conjugation Te-Form
Te-Form verb conjugation is kind of difficult and freaks quite a few people out. Unfortunately, there is te-form conjugation with adjectives. Fortunately it is MUCH easier to do te-forms with adjectives over verbs.
い-adjectives drop the final い and add くて
な-adjectives add で to the base word
You can also treat noun+です the same as な-adjectives
Here are [...]
Combining Activities with te-form verbs
We already discussed te-form verb conjugation so lets go to the next step and talk about combining activities, because lets face it we rarely just talk about one thing at a time. To do this we combine verbs to do anything from combining two actions, or two things we are doing, to describing why or [...]
