Tofugu.com – Wonky Japanese Language and Culture

It’s been a crazy few weeks for the writers at Tofugu. Everyone has been getting back into school (or finishing summer school), getting as many jobs as possible, and trying to fit their schoolwork in there in between all of that. Still, that doesn’t mean we haven’t been doing things, making deals, and thinking (daydreaming might be a better term). Anyways, here’s what we’ve been doing:

New Website:

During our internet philanderings we come across a lot of great Japan-related videos. Sadly, we don’t have “room” to post them up on tofugu, since we are sticking to fairly specific content (not so much in the video showcasing biz, more into the video/article creating thing). That’s why we’ve created boxedtofu, a site where all we do is find sweet Japanese videos, summarize them, and then comment sarcastically. It’s a lot of fun, and we will work really hard to find obscure, yet entertaining videos for all of you to check out. I think we make the video showcase blog genre a little more fun. Still, we are in “beta” stages with the website, still working a bit on functionality, menu-ality, and logo-ality. If you have any suggestions, definitely let us know. Anyways, please check us out!

New Writer(s?):
If you’re a regular reader you probably know that we’re having trouble writing enough articles. Everyone’s been terribly busy, so instead of forgetting to go to work, or watching anime, we’ve hired one new person (possibly two, we’ll see how things go) who will be bringing a lot of quality to the table. You’ll hear from them in the next week, I’m sure.

Conclusion:
As always, thanks to all of you for all your support! We can’t do it without you. Please let us know if there’s anything you think we should change and/or work on. We’re happy to take constructive and then construct something out of it.

I recently had a discussion with my friend Max about the nuances of Japanese pronunciation (maybe not so recently; it was when I was back home in Hawaii). One of the more interesting things we talked about was the fact that, in Japanese, there’s no “f” sound. This is a result of the fact that Japanese people don’t fold/bite their bottom lip when pronouncing it; they shape their mouth almost as if they were blowing out a candle (go on, give it a try). So, in Japanese, the “f” in fu (ふ) is pronounced more like an “h”, and the sound becomes hu.

Consequently, Japanese words that have been incorporated into the American vocabulary (such as tofu, futon, or Mt. Fuji) are not really pronounced the way most people think they are. For example, it’s not “tofu”, it’s “tohu”. Of course, when the Japanese word for “bean curd” (とうふ or 豆腐) is romanized, it’s still written as “tofu” because… well, just because. It’s traditional, maybe. Read more…

The other day I stumbled across of a list of “at the same time” grammar points in one of my Japanese text books. I’m studying for the Japanese Proficiency Test, ikkyu level, so all the Japanese I’m learning now either appears only in writing or is used by pompous bastards (sometimes). Still, I thought I’d share them with you anyways. Included in each paragraph will be the grammar point, a definition (though they are all basically the same), an example or two, how “usable” they are, and finally, how and when to use them. If you don’t know a kanji in a sentence, please look it up over at Mr. Breen’s house. And now…grammar! Read more…