Blog - Japanese
Me, Myself and I As I explained before, there are many words for “you” in Japanese. And, as you could expect, there are many words for “I”. Of course, English has a few as well. The difference is that the words in English are different for grammar reasons. . . .
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Hey you! As I said in a previous post about suffixes, when I first came to Japan, I never heard the word for “you”. The funny thing that is even though the word for “you” isn’t used much, there are actually several different words! You あなた (awe naw . . .
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Adjective Tenses The grammar of different languages can be quite different indeed! The title of this article is ‘Adjective Tenses’ not ‘Verb Tenses.’ The reason why is that in Japanese, not just the verbs have tenses! Gooded?? In Japanese, there aren’t as many verb tenses as in . . .
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And you are…? San, Sama and Other Suffixes When I first came to Japan, I really couldn’t speak any Japanese. There were some words that I knew. Armed with potential, I went out into public. What I didn’t realize was that my thought process was hopelessly English. One . . .
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Verb Endings In most languages, to express things such as tenses, the endings of verbs are often changed. But not all languages do that and not all languages have all tenses. For example, English doesn’t actually have a future tense. Verbs cannot be changed to indicate that something will . . .
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Plurals Plurals aren’t really a part of Japanese. In fact, many Japanese people that I have met just can’t seem to grasp the concept of why we need to add an “s” to so many words in English. Of course, I can’t imagine communicating without it (Although I do) . . .
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To Be The verb “to be” is a very important verb in English and many other languages. It has special meaning and in some cases special uses. First, the most important point is that it doesn’t mean quite the same in Japanese as it does in English. Look at . . .
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