Category Archives: Language
Counting People in Japanese
One thing we use a lot, but probably don’t realize is when we count people. “There are I’d say 15 people over there.” or “We have 6 people”. We use this quite a bit especially when it comes to groups of people.
To count people we will use にん at the end of the a [...]
ii and na adjective conjugation present and past tense
There are two types of adjectives which I will cover in another post, but for the time being know there are い-adjectives and な-adjectives. Very roughly, い-adjectives end in い and な-adjectives use な after the adjective before proceeding to the rest of the statement.
Adjectives, like verbs, conjugate for tense and polarity. However, い-adjectives and [...]
Basic Existence
Things exist in this world and we need to know how to tell others that. You might say “there is a TV in the living room”, “There is a McDonalds down the street”, “Over there is a TV”, “Tomorrow is a Test”. These are examples of phrases we use that show existence.
The root verb [...]
Why Anki is Best of Breed for SRS
There are many SRS applications people can use to memorize things, but Anki is the best for a variety of reasons. Before, I do a list of reasons some other alternatives for SRS are Mnemosyne, SuperMemo, Surusu, Smart.FM, and even ReadTheKanji.com. I have used all these besides supermemo, and anki is really the [...]
Top 9 Japanese Language Blogs
These are the top 9 language blogs, 9 because I like to be different, I follow. Some of the criteria I had in choosing these were: detail, post consistency, and up-to-date. From there it gets more into personal taste, like most lists. So here we go ready to get started?
9 – JapanesePod101.com – I know [...]
Why Your Language Book is Holding Your Japanese Back
Most books for learning are horrible for the long term learner of Japanese. There are several things to take into account when trying to learn Japanese, or any language for that matter, from fluency level to resources, and even how you learn. I want to discuss the importance of learning written language and how most [...]
Dai – Extreme Japanese Langauge
There are 2 words you learn early on when learning Japanese, すき(like) and きらい(dis-like). You also learn だいすき (love) and だいきらい (hate).
From there you can see that だい (dai) makes both like and dis-like more extreme.
Some examples are
おん debt of gratitude
そふ grandfather
If you add dai in front of them
だいおん Great debt of gratitude
だいそふ Great [...]
Japanese Verb Conjugation Te-Form
Today we are going to go over te-form’s. This is VERY important to the Japanese language because it leads to so very much. If there is one type of verb conjugation to learn and learn extremely well it would be this. For that reason this might be a bit long for some, [...]
Top 10 Japanese Tounge Twisters
After reading yonasu’s post a while back about a tongue twister he cam up with I have been mildly interested in Japanese tongue twisters. So my teacher pointed me to some good tongue twisters. According to goo ranking. Here are the Top 10 Japanese tongue twisters. (I have romanized them, but not separated the words)
1) [...]
Japanese Verb Conjugation Past Tense
Hopefully you have been following along for the last couple of days with “Understanding u-verbs and ru-verbs” and “Japanese Verb Conjugation Present and Future Tense“. If you haven’t please read both of them as they will help this one make a bit more sense. With that being said lets just jump right it [...]
