Sitting on the floor and gathered around a low-to-ground table, you and a group of friends hold your chopsticks anxiously above a pot positioned directly in the center of the table. As you’re enjoying the company and conversation, your meal…
Fried chicken is a fast food staple in the US, but fried seafood and vegetables are far more popular in Japan. Covered in a seasoned batter full of protein that’s so light you can usually see the seafood or vegetable…
It’s a hearty lunch, it’s a snack, it’s a dessert… And there’s a seemingly endless assortment of flavors from which to choose! These flour, rice powder, and buckwheat dough buns come with a variety of fillings and are boiled and…
Now that we’ve studied how to use Japanese adjectives to modify nouns as we do in English, we’re going to examine how Japanese, unlike English, can also treat adjectives like verbs. You should remember from Lesson 1 that –i adjectives…
In English, an adjective describes, or “modifies,” a noun. Japanese adjectives can do the same—but they can also function as verbs. You’ll learn more about adjectives as verbs in a future lesson. In this lesson, we’ll concentrate on using adjectives…
When you conjugate verbs in English, you have to consider the tense (present, past, future, etc.) and the subject (I, you, he/she/it, we, they). When conjugating verbs in Japanese, although you must still consider the tense, the subject is unimportant;…
Verbs are arguably more important in the Japanese language than they are in English. Japanese sentences require verbs—which typically come at the very end of the sentence—but they do not always require subjects, like English sentences do. A complete Japanese…
Particles can be a difficult subject to master in any language. Particles subtly mark the word they follow and indicate the association between that word and the rest of the sentence. (Unlike in English, in Japanese, a particle never precedes…
Ga The Japanese particle “ga” is a very versatile particle that can act as a subject marker, an object marker, and even a conjunction. “Ga” usually calls attention to a word or clause. When used as a subject marker, “ga”…
Once you’ve mastered basic counting in Japanese, you’re ready to start studying Japanese counters. What are counters? In Japanese, there are words that indicate what kind of object is being counted. These words most often have no English translation. In…
Learning how to count in Japanese is a basic, essential skill for anyone who wishes to speak Japanese! If you visit a Japanese store or even a store in a nearby Japanese-speaking community in your home country, how will you…
You learned in the sentence structure lesson that Japanese sentences do not always require subjects, as the subjects are often implied in the context of the sentence. Personal pronouns as subjects are therefore often omitted from sentences. However, to make…