A set of figurines for the Japanese zodiac we purchased in our recent trip.
Hello Readers and Happy New Year! In Japanese, people greet each other for the first time using the stock phrase akemashite omedetō gozaimasu (明けましておめでとうございます) which means something like “congrats on the opening of a new year”.
Note that Japanese New Year is based on Chinese New Year, but since early industrialization period, the Meiji Period, Japan moved away from the lunar calendar to the Western solar calendar.
The traditions inherited from Chinese culture still persist, even if the calendar changed, thus the original zodiac is still in place, and the new year is still frequently referred to as “spring” even if it is no longer anywhere close to meteorological spring.
In any case, it might sound a bit early but Happy Year of the Rabbit!
Usually when people think of Japanese food, they think of sushi, or ramen, but these are luxury foods that aren’t normally eaten at home. There is one food though that’s very popular in Japan, eaten on special occasions at home, and truly a wonderful food for winter: Oden (おでん).1
Oden is hard to explain, but it’s basically a kind of hot pot or stew where you cook various foods in there, and the family eats out of the same pot. We only cook 2-3 times a year, usually winter, since it requires a fair amount of preparation to make. I’ve also had it with my wife’s relatives in Japan during cold months.
Here’s my wife’s pot, with the oden having stewed for hours:
Inside, you can see may different foods, some skewered with bamboo sticks, others just cooking in the pot.
Oden always has a strongly brownish color due to the soy sauce and fish broth (dashi) based that’s used, similar to Udon and other foods. The items in our pot include Japanese radish (daikon), boiled and peeled eggs (yudé-tamago), fried tofu, Korean fish cakes (odeng-tang), Japanese fish cakes, noodles (harusamé) among many other things.
What’s fun is that there’s a large variety of things you can put into the pot and cook up. When you go to a convenience store in Japan, especially in Winter, they often have take-home oden, where you pick the foods you want to put in, they provide the broth, and you just carry it home. Alternatively, if you manage to find a traditional yataifood-cart,2 you can also enjoy oden there. As with the convenience store, just pick your ingredients, and enjoy. You can also mix in some Chinese hot mustard (karashii), too, but like wasabi that stuff can hurt if you add too much.
Oden sets are also available, both overseas and in Japan. These are usually frozen, and come with all basic items, but my wife likes to further embellish with boiled eggs, daikon radish. My wife doesn’t make from scratch (it would be too difficult), so using the frozen sets as a base works well for her.
Oden is a heavy comfort food, but is great on a cold winter’s evening, and well worth the opportunity if you can get it.
P.S. The Korean word odeng for the equivalent dish may be a loanword from Japan, probably during the colonial era (1910-1945), but beyond that, I am not sure.
1 I’ve never seen “oden” written in Kanji (Chinese Characters). If there’s kanji for it, it’s definitely not widely used. Shops that serve oden also write using hiragana script, not kanji.
2 I’ve been to Japan many times, but have never see one. They definitely seem to be a dwindling tradition / business model.
This proverb, literally means that the owner doesn’t know the stench of their own breath. Obviously this is not meant to be literal, instead it is about people being unaware of their own bad habits.
Another way of explaining it is that the eye cannot see itself. The eye needs a mirror. In the same way, we need to see the world around us, in order to see ourselves.
A little while back, I wrote an article about Ukrainian verbs and was going to write a similar one about Japanese verbs. But halfway through writing that article, I realized that I really needed to explain Japanese sentence structure first.
Japanese sentence structure is quite different than European languages, and so when I use something like Duolingo, I found that the textbook style presentation of Japanese isn’t very natural at all. The trouble is that trying to apply European language teaching methods to Japanese is like trying to find a square peg through a round hole.
That said, Japanese, on its own merits, isn’t that hard to learn, but it is different, so you have to learn it from the ground up. As human beings, the feelings and sentiments are the same across languages, but it’s fascinating how people have developed different methods (i.e. grammar) to express them.
Note: this page will use hiragana script in places to correctly convey the meaning. If you are unfamiliar with hiragana, check out my page on learning Hiragana script, parts one, two and three.
And with that, here we go.
Context Matters
One of the particular challenges to learning Japanese is its heavy reliance on context. This used to really throw me off when I was dating my wife and first learning the language because I couldn’t figure out who did what. Gradually as I got used to the language and could mentally “take it all in”, I could follow along more easily and pick up on context clues.
For example, unlike English or other European languages, the subject isn’t specified unless you explicitly need to. Let’s look at a typical example.
In English, I might write something like this:
Today, I went for a walk. It was sunny outside. Then I ran into my neighbor, Mr Wilson.
A similar sentence in Japanese would likely be:
Today, went for a walk. Outside, was sunny. Then, the neighbor, Mr Wilson, ran into.
Notice there is no explicit subject. It’s often implied. And, once you get used to it, it’s usually pretty obvious (Japanese people will ask if unclear, naturally). That doesn’t mean that Japanese never uses it, but usually only to address specific topics or questions:
A: Who ate the last sandwich?
B: Mr Wilson ate the last sandwich.
In any case, this is why Japanese language textbooks in English (including Duolingo) often teach it wrong: they teach students to still specify every part of the sentence even though it’s not necessary to do so in Japanese, reinforcing bad habits. Yes, this works in European languages, but it’s unnatural in Japanese.
This use of context leads into the next aspect of Japanese grammar…
Less Is More
Compared to English, Japanese can sound more curt or pithy, and at other times more flowery and wordy. Tae Kim’s excellent Guide to Japanese points out that rather than a SOV (subject-object-verb) sentence structure, Japanese’s grammar can be reduced to just V and still be fine.
Here’s a perfectly valid conversation in Japanese:
A: たべる？ (are you going to eat?)
B: たべた。(I ate [already])
This conversation usually has some context that both speakers know about, so to them it would make sense, even if it seems vague to us.
Another example my wife and I often use is:
Mrs: ごはんをたいた？ (Did you cook rice?)
Me: ん、たいた。(Yup, I cooked [rice])
Here, my wife is asking if I cooked (たく、past tense: たいた) rice (ごはん). We’ll get to the を in a moment. It’s super important. When she asks the question, she uses a rising tone for たいた, and she needs to specify what I cooked. In this case, the rice. I answered in the affirmative using ん (the non-casual, polite form is はい) and specified that I did indeed cook it (e.g. the rice).
Since my wife did have to specify other parts of the sentence that’s where particles really become important. They are little sound markers you put after the parts of speech, and help determine who’s doing what to whom. By using を (wo), it means the rice is the direct object. I am doing something to it.
Particle Man, Particle Man…
Particles don’t really have a 1:1 equivalent in English, so I won’t attempt to map them out, but they are really important in languages like Japanese or Korean where you have to give parts of speech. Sometimes particles come at the of the sentence to help give it more nuance (not required, but often used), while others are put at the end of the parts of speech you need to clarify.
This would accomplish the same thing as using inflection in languages like Latin, Greek, or modern European languages like Spanish, Italian and Ukrainian. However, instead of changing the ending to fit the part of speech, you tack on a particle.
Here’s an example that you might find in a textbook:
わたしはスーパーにいって、カレイパンをかいました。
I went to the supermarket, and bought curry bread.
This is an exaggerated example, and clunky in regular, spoken Japanese, but textbooks often teach like this in order to help reinforce parts of speech and particles.
I’ve highlighted the particles, like so:
Particle
Meaning
What it marks
は (wa)
The subject of the sentence
わたし (polite, formal “I”)
に (ni)
The target of something (e.g. where you’re going to)
スーパー (the supermarket), as in the target of where you’re going (いって)
を
The direct object (the thing you’re doing something to)
カレイパン (curry bread), the thing you bought (かいました).
But again, remember in more natural Japanese you only specify the things you need to specify. So, for example if the listener already knew that you went to the supermarket, it’s perfectly valid and correct Japanese to just say カレイパンをかいました. You could even shorten it by dropping the particle + verb and say カレイパンです. Yet another particle!
Or, if the listener wanted to know where you went to buy the curry bread, it would be perfectly fine to just answer with スーパーに, or just drop the particle and use スーパーです to substitute for both the particle and verb.
Similarly, when introducing yourself, this is how textbooks usually teach self introduction:
わたしのなまえはダグです。エンジニアです。
or…
わたしはダグです。エンジニアです。
My name is Doug. I am an engineer.
A more natural sounding version in Japanese that’s used in polite situations would be:
エンジニアのダグです。
[I am] Doug, the engineer.
The の particle here is super-handy because it modifies Doug. Doug isn’t just Doug, Doug is an engineer. Also, notice I don’t specify the subject, わたし, as it’s wordy and unnecessary (i.e. “who else would you be doing a self-introduction for?”). Simply using my name, and what I do with the polite particle です is sufficient.1
Conclusion
The key to forming good Japanese sentences is, in my opinion, learning how to start with just the verb and tack on whatever additional information you need (using particles to help specify which, what, where and who) as necessary.
Similarly, learning to recognize particles and such in other people’s sentences will help you pick up nuances and details more easily.
Good luck!
1 We aren’t going into this in this lesson, but if you want to express a more humble nuance, you could replace です with と申しましす (to mōshimasu) where と is another particle for subordinate clauses and 申しましす is a humble version of the regular verb 言う (iu, “to say”). But that’s beyond the scope of this lesson. Using です will almost always work. と申しましす will simply add a bit more flare (or, more accurately, a bit more humility).
Japanese, as a language, is somewhat unusual in that it has many, many homophones. Many of these are originally Chinese-compound words that were imported into Japanese, and subsequently lost their kind of intonation found in modern Chinese languages that would help to distinguish them. Their sound became flat and mostly indistinguishable from other similar words. Yet their Chinese characters (kanji) are different, and they still convey different meanings:
I don’t entirely agree with the rant in this video, plus his lack of understanding of the Heart Sutra, but it’s still a good explanation for how kanji were gradually imported into Japanese from a great Youtube channel.
For example, there are three different words are all pronounced igi:
意義 – Meaning, significance of something.
異議 – Objection, dissent
異義 – A homonym (ironically)
However, many native Japanese words also tend to sound like one another, and their meanings can be similarly hair-splitting. A classic example is the verb ageru:
上げる – To raise something up
揚げる – To deep fry something
挙げる- To use something as an example (e.g. to praise it)
With the verbs, you can see that stem of the verb, which doesn’t change in conjugation, will be represented by the appropriate kanji, and help you distinguish which ageru in written form you’re talking about. But even that isn’t always the case.
The verb awaseru can be written as:
合わせる – To match (or to synchronize)
併せる – To merge, or put disparate things together.
The example above gets pretty different, even for native Japanese speakers, hence there are books that help explain when to use one kanji versus another.
The good news is that for a language student, with plenty of reading practice, and the patience to build vocabulary rather than wasting time memorizing kanji, one gradually picks up these nuances and eventually gets an intuitive sense. The organic growth of the writing system, with waves of imported Chinese characters makes Japanese a difficult written system. On the other hand, despite what some Westerners assert, it is logical, definitely not impossible, and simply requires patience and practice.
One of the challenges of pronouncing Ukrainian language is the pronouncing the “soft-sign” ь. It is not an independent sound, but simply softens the letter before it through a process called palatization. I’ve struggled to understand this concept even after watching some helpful Ukrainian introduction videos.1
However, it turns out that other languages use palatization, including Sanskrit. The venerable Sanskrit language has been thoroughly studied for countless centuries and has developed (similar to Latin) well-structured learning methods, both ancient and modern:
So, palatization is just a way for taking sounds like “s”, “t” and “d” and changing them like so:
An English “t” sound becomes “ch” or something similar.
An English “s” sound becomes “sh”.
An English “d” sound becomes more like a “j” sound.
An English “n” sound becomes more like “ñ” as in canyon.
And so on.
Going back to Ukrainian in particular, the sounds change like so:
Ба́тько (father) sounds roughly like “bachko”, instead of “batko” without the soft sign.
Будь ласка (please) sounds roughly like “booj laska” instead of “bood laska”.
До́нька (daughter) uses the same nasally “n” as in “canyon” rather than regular English “n”.
Similarly, the “l” sound in сіль is a softer, more nasally “l” sound.
These are explanations by a non-native Ukrainian speaker but comparing the same process with other languages, such as Sanskrit or English, hopefully will provide another way to make sense of soft signs in Ukrainian language. Enjoy!
1 I think the issue, at heart, is that Ukrainian language hasn’t been a widely studied language until very recently. People are finally taking it seriously, and that’s a good thing. I look forward to seeing Ukrainian resources increase over time, just as Japanese language resources increased and have greatly improved since my days in college.
Despite some early signs of success, it’s become rapidly clear that if I take the N1 level of the JLPT exam this year, I will get crushed. My scores in taking the mock shorter-length essays were pretty good (hence my earlier confidence), but my scores in middle-length essays were not very good, and I got nearly 0 points when testing myself on the long essays. Coupled with continued difficulties with listening, it’s obvious that I would most likely get a poor score. Even if I did manage to pass, it would be a just barely, and hardly something to be proud of.
As you get to the higher levels of the JLPT exam, the amount of preparation time greatly increases, as the complexity of the language being tested also increases. In my past experience, I could pass the N3 with about 6-12 months of study, reading manga, etc. I passed the N2 in about a year after that, but just barely (it wasn’t a great score). By the time you get to the N1, you need about 3000 hours if starting from scratch, but even if you have prior language experience, it’s safe to assume you need a subset of this depending on your background.
For a working parent not living in Japan, I cannot always get 1 hour a day consistently, so that means my progress is slow. I have definitely made progress this year, as I can see that all the new vocabulary I learned is paying off, however, what really matters is whether you can read adult material at a near-natural speed, and if you can follow adult conversations without too much headache. The essays, especially the longer ones, require you to read a lengthy essay, sometimes philosophical, sometimes business related, and pick up the main points, and answer the questions in roughly 5-8 minutes. Doing this in your native language is hard enough, now do it in a foreign language.
Similarly, if you’re not able to keep up with adult conversation, adult podcasts or TV shows, you’ll have trouble keeping up with elaborate (sometimes artificial) dialog in the JLPT exams.
You cannot really cram for these things. Memorizing vocabulary is one thing, but actually comprehending a foreign language takes considerable time, and it’s obvious that for the N1, it will take years. I am proud of the progress I made, and I am proud for keeping my focus all these months, but unfortunately, it’s just not enough. I need more time.
So, regretfully, I will not be taking the N1 exam this year. Instead, I have a stack of Japanese books at home: manga, essays, history books, computer books, etc, that I plan to slowly read through over the next year, and I have a long list of Japanese language podcasts I use to keep up with my listening. If I don’t build up natural reading skills and listening skills, there’s just no point in taking the exam at this level.
Maybe next year will be a different story. I am worried about losing focus over the coming year, especially since I still dabble in learning Ukrainian, plus other projects, but I’ve been wanting to pass the JLPT for a long time, so I think that desire will carry me through. If not, I guess we’ll find out.
P.S. My supposed retreat hasn’t been going all that well in general either. More on that later. So much for taking a break from blogging.
Listening in general is one of the most arduous skills to learn for a foreign language. After I started studying Ukrainian for fun, I soon found out how little I could actually follow in actual conversation. It has been pretty demoralizing.1
On the other hand, I have been studying Japanese for since the late 2000’s, and married into the culture, so I do have some conversational skills, but for level N1 of the JLPT exam that’s still not quite enough.
Case in point: in the months leading up to the 2022 exam, I have started using mock exams and other study guides, but to my horror I have so far been getting about 40% – 45% correct on the listening sections which is just barely a passing score. So while I may have a shot at passing the JLPT, it’s far from certain.
There’s no rational way to cram listening skills either: you either grasp the conversation, or you don’t. And the only way to improve your grasp of Japanese conversation is to get used to it through constant, constant exposure.
It’s like stretching a muscle. You can’t force it or rush it, you have to ease into it over time. Stretching a little at a time, until looking back you can stretch it much more than you used to.
Another way to look at is is from a classic Roger Zelazny story, Doorways in the Sand.2 At one point, the main character Fred, is listening to two aliens having a conversation about him in their native language:
At some earlier time I had slowly realized that the thing that would most have surprised them probably surprised me more. This was the discovery that, when I gave it a piece of my divided attention, I could understand what they were saying.
A difficult phenomenon to describe, but I’ll try: If I listened to their words, they swam away from me, as elusive as individual fish in a school of thousands. If I simply regarded the waters, however, I could follow the changing outline, the drift, pick out the splashes and sparklings. Similarly, I could tell what they were saying. Why this should be, I had no idea.
Language is weird, but I definitely have the same experience when listening to Japanese language podcasts: if I focus my mental energy on trying to discern one sentence, I lose track of the rest of the conversation. So, it’s more about getting used to the conversation as a whole, and as any music student will probably tell you, it takes time to tune your ear.
1 I haven’t stopped learning Ukrainian, but it has forced me to re-evaluate my methods a little.
2 Out of all his books, this one is definitely in my top 5 favorites.
While I’ve been blogging a lot recently about Buddhism, Japanese history and Ukrainian language, etc, I have been quietly studying for the JLPT exam in the background. 😎
As of writing, the 2022 JLPT exam in the US will be held in early December (as is usually the case), and so with only 4 and one-half months left, I’ve decided to switch gears and focus on taking practice tests instead. The two most difficult sections of the JLPT are (depending on your background) reading comprehension (dokkai 読解) and listening (chōkai 聴解).
The last time I tried the N1 level of the exam, I wanted to see if I could pass without practicing. I wanted to see if I had attained enough exposure to Japanese language by then to simply pass it naturally. I didn’t. The JLPT exam, starting with N2 and especially the N1 aren’t normal conversational Japanese. You’re being tested on various subjects such your comprehension of business, government, education, even philosophy.1 Day to day exposure to Japanese language helps to some degree, but you as these are specialty topics you need to also practice and study them.
In any case, I broke out my practice exams for reading and listening, both available from OMGJapan and other fine Japanese goods stores, and started taking practice tests.
My mind initially panicked when tyring to read the Japanese essays. Some of the words that I had studied had been forgotten, some words were unfamiliar. However, I fought my initial panic, and worked my way through the practice essays one after another. To my surprise, when I checked my answers, I got 75% correct, which is a passing score.
I was thrilled. I realized that with further practice, I have a genuine shot at passing the JLPT exam, level N1. The reading that I have been doing over the year almost certainly helped, as did the vocabulary study (even if I haven’t even finished half the study book).
However, I also realized that I still have further preparation to do: learn the words I didn’t know, get smoother at reading, and learn NOT TO PANIC. That will come with repeated practice, I believe.
1 I was surprised to find an essay on what defines a peaceful death in the mock exam (I doubt this is in the real exam, btw). Clearly the author hadn’t watched Conan the Barbarian:
In recent weeks, as my study of Ukrainian language continues, I was fortunate to find a coworker at my company who is a native Ukrainian speaker, and happy to help me. As we’ve been talking, I’ve come to learn some interesting things about how various cultural influences have affected it.
The Saint Sophia Cathedral, in Kyiv, modeled after the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople at a time when Kyivan Rus and the Byzantine Empire had close relations. Rbrechko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
For example, the greeting I learned in Duolingo for “good morning” was добрий ранок (sounds like “dobree ranohk”), but then my Ukrainian co-worker explained that there are actually two common greetings. The first one is the aforementioned добрий ранок, and the other is доброго ранку (“dobroho ranku”). What’s the difference? The first one (добрий ранок) is a more Russian-style greeting, while the second (доброго ранку) is more native Ukrainian. Similarly, добрий день vs. доброго дня
To clarify, both are very common greetings in Ukraine, and no one would look at you weird for using either one. It’s just that one shows considerable Russian influence, while the other doesn’t. Also, since Ukraine is a relatively big country in Europe, it has some regional variation, so you might hear one more commonly in one regions versus another.
It turns out there’s a lot of this Ukrainian. There’s a lot of words and phrases that come from Russian, but not actually Russian-language, while other similar words and phrases show a more native Ukrainian background.
Another example my friend explained to me is how Ukrainian language frequently derives words from Russian, especially when translating from Russian sources. For the ongoing war, a common term is понесли втрати (ponesly vtraty, “suffered loses”), which derives from the similar Russian term понесли потери (poniesli potieri). However, in a more native Ukrainian way, you can also say зазнали втрат (zaznaly vtrat). The native, Ukrainian way is noticeably different than Russian, but it’s sometimes more expedient to use Russian-derived terms instead.
Sometimes this difference in phrasing reflects generational gaps too, with older generations often using more Russian-influenced terminology and phrasing versus the younger, post-Soviet generation more keen on using native Ukrainian more, to say nothing of the politics behind it all.
However, I didn’t want to just talk about Ukraine and Russia, another interesting thing that I found is that I noticed a lot of words that sounded vaguely like Latin to me, or Latin-derived. A prime example is Вино (sounds like vih-noh) for “wine”. This sounds fairly close to the Latin “vinum”, and not the Ancient Greek term οἶνος (“oinos”), which is surprising given how much closer Greece is to Ukraine. This may be due to influence from nearby Polish, a Catholic culture, despite its Orthodox heritage which derived from the Byzantine Empire.
Numbers, too, reflect some interesting patterns:
No.
Ukrainian
Latin
Greek
Russian
Polish
1
один (odin)
unus
ένα (ena)
один (odin)
jeden (ye-den)
2
два (dva)
duo
δύο (duo)
две (dve)
dwa (dva)
3
три (trih)
tres
τρία (tria)
три (tri)
trzy (tshih)
4
чотири (chotihrih)
quattuor
τέσσερα (tessera)
четыре (četyre)
cztery (chte-rih)
The number four in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish more closely resembles Latin than Greek. Could this reflect some kind of eastward influence from the West? Honestly, I wish I knew more about the subject, but it’s fascinating how various cultural centers in Europe, both near and far, converged in places like Kyiv, and how the language reflects these layers of influence.
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields 
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