Although social media is mostly a waste of time, from a language learning point of view, it’s a great way to get involved in conversations with natives and see the back and forth that can result.
Seeing as most journalist’s attempt at research and investigation or original story writing involves getting a single tweet from someone semi-famous (or better) and building a story around it, browsing through news aggregators can be a way to find the more interesting posts, as well as get a learned opinion about it (that last part was sarcastic).
So today let’s look at a common cat activity: being a butthead.
First, the usual ちがう, now while this word technically means ‘different’, it’s a fantastic word to learn if you want to sound like a Japanese person. This word is used a lot, and really means ‘no’, as in, ‘no, you’re wrong’.
Then there is the それは, referring to the dog bed (yes that’s right, it’s a DOG bed), followed by the phrase 犬に買った, which is more advanced usage of the に particle but shows that the dog bed was bought for the dog.
Finally, the addition of んだ adds emphasis, here emphasising that the bed was bought for the DOG, and not for the cat. So get off it cat. Funnily enough, there was another interesting phrase in here to describe the cat: 我が物顔 (わがものがお).
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