In Tokyo, you can rarely walk along a street, turn left four times and arrive on the same street you started on. Like Edo roads, Kobun conjugations do not form expected paths. We’ve gone over most of the winding alleys … [Read more...]
What do dinosaurs, outdated fashions, and SNL have in common? They’re going to help us with Classical Japanese. Today’s course in your Kobun education is easy breezy: Jodoushi (助動詞). They’re “helper” or auxiliary verbs. I … [Read more...]
Please read my introduction to Kobun article before reading this one. Brave Kobun pupils! I’m going to take you further into the woods of Classical Japanese with verbs. Remember, Kobun is very different from Modern … [Read more...]
I've been known in the past to say you can't learn Japanese from anime... and that's still quite true. The amount of people out there who watch thousands of hours of (admittedly addicting) anime under the pretense that … [Read more...]
Ask just about anyone who's learning Japanese what their method for learning kanji is and you'll almost certainly get a disproportionately passionate / angry answer out of them, myself included. There's something about … [Read more...]
Since a lot of Tofugu readers fancy the older, traditional stuff in Japan, (and for a lot of other reasons as well) I’m going to be writing a series of introductory lessons on 古文 (こぶん) or 文語 (ぶんご), the “literary language” … [Read more...]