April - 2015

This section contains lots of useful grammar notes which will help you improve your Japanese substantially. If you have further queries on grammar, feel free to ask us and we will try our best to answer them =)

Tomoki Moriyama

Apr 24, 2015

The BIG differrence between へ and に

1. オーチャードへ行きます。 2. オーチャードに行きます。 Whats the difference between へ and に？If your Japanese teacher says that they are the same, please reconsider. Example sentence 1 above is the simple form of the sentence. And what about sentence 2? This sentence has some 'hidden meaning' in the sentence. オーチャードに行きます。（for shopping, or to meet my friend, etc) When the sentence uses “に”, it is implying that there's another/other purpose(s) to do in Orchard. If you are mentioning to just

Tomoki Moriyama

Apr 10, 2015

Why negative form of 「いいです」is 「よくないです」？

When you first learned that negative form of 「いいです」is 「よくないです」instead of 「いいです」, did you think why the first syllable of 「い」 is changed to 「よ」？And did you have same question when you learned that past tense form of 「いいです」is 「よかったです」, instead of 「いかったです」？ The reason is that 「よいです」is actually the old word of 「いいです」, so negative form of 「よいです」should be「よくないです」, and past tense should be 「よかったです」. The word 「いいです」was used since the17th Century. Now even in current Japanese , 「

Tomoki Moriyama

Apr 3, 2015

「何」: 'nan' or 'nani'?

You can read this kanji in two ways: 'nan' and 'nani'. So how to know which pronunciation to use? 'nan' 1) When it precedes a word whose first mora is either in the Ta, Da, or Na- row. eg, お名前は何(nan)ですか。これは何(nan)の本ですか。何(nan)で学校に行きますか。 2) When it is followed by a counter suffix eg, 今は何（nan)じ　ですか。学生が何（nan)にん　いますか。シャツが何（nan)まい　ありますか。 'nani' 1) when it is followed in all other cases eg, 何（nani)を　食べましたか。何（nani)か　欲しい物がありますか。

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