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If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my YouTube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
恵方巻き （e.Ho.u.Ma.Ki ) – uncut sushi roll eaten during 節分・せつぶん
ご明察 （Go.Me.i.Sa.Tsu ) – intellectual acumen
お手伝い （o.Te.Tsu.Da.i)
海苔茶漬け （No.Ri.Cha.Zu.Ke) – erm, nori chazuke, it’s delicious
エゾタヌキ （e.Zo.Ta.Nu.Ki) – Japanese racoon dog found in Hokkaido.
エゾタヌキ
母音字
英単語には「a.i.u.e.o」という母音字*を含まない単語もあります。
sky
cry
gym
why
rhythm
lymph
*母音字は文字のことを意味するのに対し、母音は音のことをさす。
みなさんもぜひ「a.i.u.e.o」の入った言葉を探してみてくださいね！
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
In Japanese there are a bunch of grammatical forms that you see in a textbook, but their usage in real life can be quite different.
Today we’re going to look at 使役「しえき」, which are called causative verbs.
I was never one for linguistics, so it’s easier for me (and you!) to instead think of these as ‘forcing’ someone to do something, or ‘letting’ them do something.
In Japanese, this can be said as 「他に何かの動作をさせること。」but like all bad definitions, this contains the very word in it that I’m trying to explain.
However, the point of this blog post is not to teach you about causative verbs per se, but to introduce how they can change slightly, especially in spoken Japanese. This is a tricky topic in Japanese and there have been many guides that deal with it better than me: Japanese and English.
However, this version of it is a much easier way to create causative verbs, however you will still need to know both ways.
One of the first times I came across this is when I had someone from the gas company come to my apartment to do something with the gas supply. After he had done a bit of work outside, he came to the げんかん and then said「点検さして」, pointing at the gas panel thing above my head.
I didn’t really understand what he said, but I did know what 点検「てんけん」 meant, and I assumed because it didn’t have the causative verb in there (or so I thought!) I went ahead and clicked the switch he was pointing to.
Of course, this confused him because he specifically said, ‘let me do the inspection’. So after staring at me for a second, he proceeded to take his shoes off and step up into my apartment to finish his inspection. I then returned to my laptop to study some more Japanese as I had obviously missed something.
Now the simple way to make all these verbs, is to make the standard causative verb conjugation first, but then just change the ending from せる to す.
You can check for yourself in a dictionary and these will have separate entries, such as 泣かす・走らす・取らす and many others.
Let’s look at a bunch of examples to see this in action:
体力をつけるため生徒を走らした。
The students were made to run by the teacher to gain stamina.
牛乳がないので弟を買い物に行かした。
Because there was no milk, my younger brother was made to go shopping for it.
発音練習のために英語の文章を読ます。
To practice pronunciation practice, we were made to read English sentences.
先生は日記を日本語で書かす。
The teacher made us write a diary in Japanese.
運動不足の弟を歩かす。
My unfit brother was forced to walk.
赤ちゃんにミルクを飲ます。
Make a baby drink milk.
お母さんはお父さんにゴミを捨てさす。
My mum made my dad take out the rubbish.
寒くなったので生徒に窓を閉めさす。
Because it became cold, the student was made to shut the window.
大家さんは部屋を綺麗に掃除さす。
We were made to clean the room by the landlord.
お母さんは私にたくさん野菜を食べさす。
I am made to eat a lot of vegetables by my mother.
上司は部下にデータを入力さす。
The subordinates were made to enter the data by the boss.
お父さんは私に車を運転さす。
My dad made me drive.
So that wraps it up, although there are many more examples. Let me know in the comments if there are any other common variations of this grammar that you see. Thanks for reading and see you in the next blog post!
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
Introduced at around the N4 level for the JLPT, the ようにしている grammar is extremely useful in a wide variety of expressions, but we’re going to look at some specific usages of this referring to habits and making effort to do things.
習慣的にしていることをいう表現 An expression that refers to what you are doing habitually V(辞書形 / ナイ形）＋ようにしている：to try to, to make sure that
The Boss Man
An explanation of why this grammar operates this way is best read on Tae Kim’s page Trying, so have a read of that as well as the example sentences given on that page to get a feel for it, then of course come back to my page to read my example (please).
Don’t make me beg~
Worked examples
So let’s go through some examples to see how this particular grammar point is used. As always, I’d recommend you use a browser plugin to help you read kanji.
毎日野菜を食べるようにしている。I’m trying to eat vegetables every day.
健康のためになるべく歩くようにしている。I try to walk as much as possible for my health.
遅く寝ないようにしている。I try not to go to bed late.
体重が気になるので食べ過ぎないようにしている。I’m worried about my weight, so I’m trying not to eat too much.
あのあたりは治安が悪いので行かないようにしている。I make an effort not to go there because it is unsafe.
古いものを壊れないように触っている。I’m handling the antique in a way so as not to break it.
風で飛ばされないように固定する。Secure it so that it will not be blown away by the wind.
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
School trips in Japan are something else. We’ve all been on a day trip to the zoo or a museum. Perhaps you don’t learn much on the trip. But school trips in Japan, especially those for high school students, are done by almost every school and last a whole week.
Known as 修学旅行 (しゅうがくりょこう), these tend to focus on learning about Japanese culture and history through site visits, lectures and other activities.
A blog post on 修学旅行 might be useful to get an introduction to it, you can find it here.
So first, we have the mention that not only high schools do such trips but also primary and middle schools. There is also the mention of 林間学校 (りんかんがっこう) which are outdoor schools, a type of camping trip that is common in Australian schools (we call it Outward Bound, awesome fun!).
There is also the point that being a high school student, you get a lot more free time for the high school trip. The use of the word 修学 is interesting, as it already means learning or dedication to a topic. So as the blog post points out, such a trip includes group activities, keeping to a schedule, following school rules and touching on history and culture.
There is also the final point that rather than being a trip for playtime or fun, it is more about rules, discipline, knowledge and learning.
I was fortunate enough to be put into 二年生 upon my arrival to Japan for exchange, even though I was perhaps at the age for 一年生. My guess is that they want me to go on the school trip so put me in that year.
Unfortunately, the school trip season goes from April to June or so, which meant that as I arrived near the end of March, my Japanese was absolutely terrible when we went on the trip. It’s not that I didn’t have fun, but it did make it hard to get a lot of information from the trip as I couldn’t read much or understand the lectures.
My school did a very standard school trip. As I hadn’t been able to read much about it or get told much about it that I understood, the destination and schedule were a mystery to me. This never used to bother me although perhaps I should’ve taken more ownership over my life.
We took the 新幹線 to Hiroshima where our first destination was the 広島平和記念公園 (ひろしまへいわきねんこうえん) or Peace Park, which contains the infamous 原爆ドーム (げんばくドーム) or Atomic Bomb Dome, formally a Hiroshima business development building.
It was amazing to see the building with my own eyes, having seen it in so many textbooks. As an aside, I often get asked what the Japanese attitude to WW2 is, and while I don’t want to speak for a whole nation, I can say that personally every Japanese person has expressed regret over how WW2 happened and explicitly stated it was wrong.
Part of this school trip is indeed to get the Japanese to confront this history, and I never saw the textbook revisionism or watering down of history that Japan is constantly accused of.
After that, we were walked around the park and laid the chain of 1000 origami cranes that we had folded in class in the preceding weeks, known as 千羽鶴 (せんばづる) at Sadoko’s statute.
Then we had a trip to a lecture hall where we heard a speech from a survivor of the bombing, followed by a trip to 宮島 (みやじま), one of Japan’s most popular tourist destinations and features the famous floating Torii gate and 厳島神社.
We stayed overnight on the island and then made our way to the next destination, 神戸. Kobe had large parts of it destroyed in the 阪神・淡路大震災 of 1995, and so we visited a museum dedicated to the event as well as researching earthquakes.
We had the afternoon off so I hung around with my classmates and we walked around Kobe, at which point we met up with the rest of the group to take the bus to 大阪. We stayed in a hotel near Universal Studios Japan, which was our destination for the next day.
In the end, it was a very enjoyable trip that I could clearly see was related to the topics we were studying in several classes such as history, Japanese history, home economics and others.
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
The te form is one of those topics that so many Japanese learners never get past. It involves some funky table, or a song, and it can’t really be translated into English. It ends up being the graveyard for many a Japanese learner.
To spoil the ending, I never really learnt the te form through any of the techniques that were presented to me through my various Japanese classes and living in Japan.
I was also not making the te form correctly even after passing JLPT 三級, (was it 三級? It was way back in 2003 so I can’t remember anymore, but I don’t think I went for 四級) which flawed as the test may be, certainly attempts to test whether you understand the te form.
I distinctly remember getting corrected on a te form (embarrassingly I still didn’t know the difference between している and しっている) in 2008 or 2009, a full five(!) years after my ten months in Japan and after graduating with 90% in my high school Japanese program.
Just so you know, the mistake I made was I was trying to write that I loved someone「愛している」but ended up typing「愛しっている」, which is nonsensical but I guess means ‘I know love!’. Not quite the same. But I do remember thinking, ‘why do I still not understand this basic thing?’.
At least I didn’t leave it up as a status on a messenger program for weeks until someone pointed it out to me (I did do that, probably it was up for months).
The te form is a topic I do spend a bit of time with a lot of my students on, and I’m yet to really find a good way of teaching it.
Even when I think I’ve condensed it down so that it is not some massive topic, I can ask a student a few weeks later to make some te forms and they can’t do it, or I see them misusing it in some written work.
One of my attempts at explaining the te form.
Also, I’m a Japanese teacher so you can contact me for lessons via the information at the bottom of this post.
So what should be done about this? Well, the te form is definitely a memorization exercise. There is really no way around it. If you’re not willing to learn at least 13 separate words, as in my video above, I think you’re going to have a very hard time getting your head around the topic (let alone the rest of Japanese).
And the 13 words is just covering the verbs, and then only the positives, so you’re not even done with it at that point.
So for example, the above picture is one that I mocked up recently to help my students, and it basically contains every te form you’ll need to know: the all-important verbs, and then also nouns, adjectives and all negatives.
So how can you use this to learn? You’ll need to write out all the words in the first column: たべる・はなす・かく and so on. Then, leave it for a day or two, and then try and write the te forms next to each. Check against the table, or better yet have someone check it for you.
You’ll also want to find a Japanese language partner, and have a go at practicing these. This is vital, as the addition of a っ or other vowel changes can be hard to hear as a JSL speaker, but a Japanese person (or someone like me) can point out that you’re pronouncing them wrong.
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
If you’ve ever watched Japanese TV, you might be surprised at the amount of subtitles that you get on almost any show.
白鵬ドキュメント 日下開山、最後の十五日
The subtitles are not limited to the traditional closed caption subtitles for the hard of hearing, but are put on the show itself by the production team.
There are several reasons for this which are interesting to go through, so let’s get into it.
Generational Reasons
Comedy in Japan has a long tradition, but the entry onto the scene of comedians from the Kansai region brought up a few problems. The dialect of the area, 関西弁（かんさいべん）, is frankly quite hard to understand if you’re not used to it.
The majority of media, especially when this change started to happen, was always in 標準語（ひょうじゅんご）which is the Tokyo dialect or standard Japanese.
This lead to conflicts in households, as people not used to the fast-paced Kansai dialect missed many jokes and references, used to complain that they didn’t understand the TV anymore that their kids wanted to watch, leading to lots of repetition of jokes.
The use of subtitles started to get used in particular with one of the most famous comedy groups, Downtown, and has since exploded in popularity to be on almost every TV show.
絶対に笑ってはいけないホテルマン24時間 – The two founding members of Downtown seen here on the left and centre.
Kanji is Hard
Another big reason why subtitles are so common, is that it’s a great opportunity for repeated Kanji exposure.
How should you learn Kanji? By watching my videos of course!
If you’re constantly seeing subtitles while at the same time hearing people speak how they’re pronounced, this allows you to subconsciously study Kanji, get practice with Kanji you don’t see so much, and also have difficult sciencey words written down for your viewing pleasure.
This is important for the native speakers as well!
Some kanji can be ridiculously complex, so having large font kanji helps you to see exactly how the Kanji is written.
Helps with Understanding
Of course, one of the big reasons why subtitles are great is that for those who are hard of hearing, its a great way to understand what is going on without having to rely on closed captions.
Another issue with Japanese is that there are many homophones or words that sound the same but have a different meaning. Obviously context means you can work out which one is being used, but it doesn’t hurt to clear up confusion every now and then. This can be particularly a problem in more formal settings, like the news broadcast, which has a much higher percentage of these types of words.
There is also a tendency to use lots of puns in Japanese comedy, and so subtitles can help make this clearer.
Societal Reasons
While perhaps not the most common reason, given the population density and societal norms, it is good to have subtitles in certain situations.
Someone stuck this on the door opposite mine in the apartment complex I lived in: “Every night until late you’re so noisy! Once it gets past 10 or 11 at night be quiet! Noisy! People surrounding you have to wake up at 6 to go to work, so be quiet!”
For example, many houses in Japan are very close together and with paper-thin walls, so blaring the TV at night is probably not the best move. Also can be good if you’re on the train or bus.
Other Random Reasons
A bit of ‘research’ on this topic gave some other reasons, for example that having lots of flashing words in colours can help draw attention or a way to do emphasis. You’ll also see a very manga-heavy style usage of emoji and other symbols to denote sadness, anger etc.
Another reason is that some TV shows started using them and rated well, so everyone just copied them.
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
Counting and its various topics is generally going to be one of those areas that you’ll probably never get truly comfortable with in a second language.
That doesn’t mean you should give up on the topic, but it does allow you to put into perspective what is achievable, and more importantly what is not.
You will be able to find many people who are near-native in a second language, but will still do the most basic calculations using their native language. There’s a lot of rote memorisation and other techniques that make this the case, and no one wants to unlearn all these (or relearn their equivalents in another language).
There’s even some research that points to how certain languages are not very ‘transparent’ when it comes to the name for a number versus it’s value on the number line. For example, out of the languages I have spent a few minutes looking at, French stuck out as having one of the worst number systems ever. But then again their bread is delicious so the French aren’t all bad.
This article looks at several continental languages and particularly focuses on Dutch, pointing out that young children who count in Dutch don’t seem to do as well versus their counterparts in the UK on certain number problems, and their hypothesis is that the structure of the language or numbering system puts an extra mental strain on these children.
Also mentioned are Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which are praised for their more methodical counting system. I guess at some level I agree with them, but not everything is as straightforward on the surface.
So let’s look at a random article that contains a fair few numbers to see how Japanese will deal with having to present some data:
In the third paragraph, the opener goes like this, 集められた約400人の被験者に質問をぶつけたところ
Here we have one of the classic number issues in Japanese for both natives and JSL’ers alike: counters. I’ve done an AMAZING video on counters that you can watch below to get a good introduction to the topic here:
I’ve also done other videos that you can find earlier in my Youtube career but they’re not my best work
From about 3 minutes of the above video, I talk about the counter 人, so we can know that 400人 is read as よんひゃくにん and means 400 people. These 400 people were surveyed to understand what the definition of ‘asshole’ is.
In my opinion this word is totally overused, especially by Americans. As an Australian, we have an issue as our accent means we pronounce ‘ass’ more like an upper-class Brit, so you’ll find many Australians switch to the American nasally pronunciation of this word to give it a bit more oomph.
The next number that pops up in the article is from this snippet: 約3分の1(35.26％)を占め. First, we have this useful counting word of 約（やく）which means approximately, and then the next part is read as さんぶんのいち.
Now this is definitely something you have to get used to in Japanese, in that they structure fractions the opposite way that us English speakers are used to. 3分の1 is actually one third, so the denominator is said first, then joined to the numerator with の.
To spell out 35.26％ would be さんじゅうごてんにじゅうろくパーセント, notice the use of 点（てん）to denote the decimal point. Japanese people often shorten % to パ.
Similarly, we then have 約半数(50.13％)を占め, with this word 半数（はんすう） meaning half the number.
Next we have 男性が約8割(79.35％), which introduces the concept of 割（わり）, which stands for 10 percent, thus ８割 meaning 80 percent.
20 percent off from the stickered price
Finally, one of the last examples of a number format is another counter, with 14カテゴリ rearing its head in the 2nd last paragraph. カテゴリ stands for category, so there are 14 categories.
If you found this lesson useful, I’d really appreciate a donation. It goes directly into supporting this website and me to produce more content that will help you improve your Japanese.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form or acejapanese@protonmail.com. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
