Recently, I learned about Dogen on Patreon via Tofugu. No, not this 道元. This one. (Although, I just now made this connection. Could it be…?) Anyways, I sort of knew Japanese had a pitch accent, but Dogen’s Patreon page makes it painfully clear that it is not a simple thing, to be ignored. Well, I guess you can ignore it, since context will provide information to the Japanese listener trying to understand my feeble attempts to speak. But wouldn’t it be cool to use はし in conversation, and have the listener know immediately what you meant? I have to confess, though, this is a BIG demotivator. It just adds another… Read More
Continue ReadingConversing in Japanese: Homonyms and Pitch
One of my favourite blogs about Japan on the net is Japanese Rule of 7. And one of my favourite posts on this blog is where Seeroiさん discusses the difficulties of all languages, but Japanese in particular. Kanji terrify people. I discussed them first on this blog because I both love and fear them, but also because I wanted to get them out of the way. They are a lot of work to master, but they are comparatively easy compared to listening to other humans speaking Japanese, and you responding to them in a grammatical fashion. (Or at least 45% grammatical, which is my goal these days.) No, as is… Read More
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