When learning a language you often find yourself perplexed with what to learn. The Japanese language in particular often overwhelms students – kanji, hiragana, katakana, idioms, dialects and polite language such as keigo. With the prospect of so much to learn most students give up learning Japanese as it seems just too difficult and time consuming. You could spend decades studying the Japanese language. However, it doesn’t take years and years to become proficient in spoken Japanese. If you have a clear focus and good study habits you can speak Japanese with only a year of study.
What should on study first? This a difficult question to answer as will depend on your own goals. However, once you have the basic greetings and some vocabulary under your belt you should start learning questions. Understanding questions is paramount in any language. If you visit Japan you will no doubt attract attention and be asked questions. Most conversation begin with questions so it is important to develop an understanding of sentence structure. So before you begin to consider learning polite Japanese, Kanji, idioms and Japanese dialects spend plenty of time learning questions.
Here are ten questions on the subject of food. I have provided English translations. Try to memorize all ten and use them the next time you met a Japanese person. Click on the audio player and repeat after Kaoru Sensei.
Audio Lesson – Question On Food
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すきなたべものはなんですか
きらいなたべものはだんですか
くだものはなにがすきですか
りょうりはできますか
とくいりょうりはなんですか
きょうのあさはなにをたべまいしたか
きのうのよるごはんはなんでしたか
コンビニでたべものをどれくらいよくかいますか
エスニック料理はすきですか
いままでたべたなかでいちばんかわったものはなんですか
What foods do you like?
What foods do you hate?
What’s a fruit you like?
Can you cook?
What’s something you can make/cook well?
What did you eat for breakfast today?
What did you eat for dinner yestartday?
How often do you buy food at a convenience store?
Do you like ethnic food?
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?
When living in Japan I found myself in many situations where I would struggle to converse despite being a fairly confident speaker. Going to the post office was one such situation. I wouldn’t go to the post office more than once or twice every few months so having a parcel or letter sent was always a bit of a challenge. More often than not it wasn’t that I didn’t understand what was being said, it was an inability to decipher the polite language and respond quickly. In most customer service situations Japanese will use a lot of polite language and speak quickly.
My wife and I created a 2-part lesson explaining what language you’ll need to understand when going to the post office. With this Japanese lesson below you’ll be able to handle any post office situation.
Japanese Lesson -- Part 1
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If you would like to watch part 2 and access all 32 lessons then take action click the button below.
You know what adverbs are, right? Adverbs modify verbs. In English, adverbs are words like “slowly” in “John slowly walked down the street.” or “creatively” in “My wife creatively folded the paper into a crane.” Students of Japanese tend to learn one adjective, the adjective totemo and then move on Kanji or keigo or something else. I guess the reason for this Japanese adverbs are a little confusing. So let’s learn Japanese with a few new adjectives to put a little wasabi in your Japanese
There are two kinds of Japanese adverbs. There are adverbs and then modified adjectives that play the role of adverbs.The first kind are words that have always been adverbs, and the second are adjectives that are placed in a particular inflection so as to act adverbially. You will understand. In fact you are probably already using these adjectival adverbs.
Japanese Adverbs
The first type of adverbials are mostly quantifiers. Words such as sukoshi, meaning “a little bit”, zutto, meaning “very much”/”throughout” or tokidoki, meaning “sometimes”.
Here is a list of a few more;
Daibu – greatly
Totemo – very
Taihen - very, awfully
Adjectival adverbs
The second type can be constructed out of either verbal adjectives, or noun adjectives. However, the way they are inflected to become adverbs is different for the two.
Verbal Adjectives
Change verbal adjectives to the ku form and then it can be used as an adverb. For instance, the verbal adjective hayai, meaning “early” can be made an adverb by dropping the i and adding ku, resulting in hayaku. This can then be used with for instance the verb for “waking up”, okiru: hayaku okiru – to wake up early.
Here are a few more;
hidoku – appallingly
sugoku - terribly, amazingly
yoku – well
tsuyoku – strongly
Noun adjectives
Noun adjectives can be turned into adjectives by instead of adding na as suffix, adding ni as suffix. For instance, kirei is a noun adjective meaning “pretty”, kireini is an adverb meaning pretty. If we pair this with the verb for “to split”, wakeru we get niwakeru meaning “to cleanly split” (such as a piece of cake spilt among children)
nazen ni – completely
amari ni excessively
migoto ni – astonishingly
hijyou ni – extraordinarily
yakeni – horribly
I hope this helps. Now you should know a few more adjectives than just tetomo.
Japanese Weather
One of the challeneing apsects I found while in Japan was the Japanese weather. Japan has four distinct seasons – you guessed it, summer, Autumn, winter and spring. The summers are hot and humid, Autumn is cool, winter is cold and dry, and spring is just beautiful.
Japanese summers are tough going if you live in major cities like tokyo or Osaka. The humidity is very high and you’ll notice that you body oils rather than sweets. Copying with sticky hands and
The Japanese autumn would have to be my favorite season in Japan. The weather is perfect taking walking trips. The koyo season, Autumn leave is truly magical in Japan. One of my favorite things to do was to take walks with my family at national parks and see the brightly colored Autumn leaves.
Japanese winters are very cold. Thankfully, I didn’t like in Hokkaido which has the coldest tempertures in Japan.
Spring in Japanese is indeed a lovey time with the Sakura tress in bloom.
Japanese Lesson on the Weather
In this post we have a short video lesson on “commenting on the weather”.