This post is going to be a combination of a grammatical lesson and a vocabulary list. Why, you ask? Because understanding verb grammar will help you understand the difference between two types of verbs – transitive and intransitive.
Archive for the ‘Tango Tuesdays’ Category
単語 Tuesdays – Transitive / Intransitive Verb Pairs
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012単語 Tuesdays: Japan’s Weird Counting System
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
This picture says “One, two, three little cats. Ah, ah, aaah!”
Counting probably doesn’t strike you as a difficult or unusual part of the English language. It’s pretty easy and rigid, with no changes in pronunciation or words depending on what you’re counting. Think of it like this – when you are counting the amount of something we always use the same numbers – one, two, three, and so on. However, Japanese has a rather different counting system which it seems to have partially inherited from Chinese (you can see how it works in Chinese here). Instead of using the generic numbers for things like we do in English, Japanese prefixes a “counter word” before the thing being counted.
単語 Tuesdays – Fruits
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
The theme for this week’s 単語 Tuesday is some healthy foods you should eat regularly – fruits! It’s a little deeper than just a bunch of fruit names – we’ll talk about stuff you can do to them as well.
単語 Tuesdays: Hair
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
First of all, before I hop into the post, I want to explain what 単語 Tuesdays are. If you don’t know the word, 単語 means “vocabulary.” Every other Tuesday will come a vocab lesson based on a theme. In today’s case, it’s hair!
Hair comes in all shapes and varieties. You can have long hair, short hair, straight hair, afro hair, blonde hair, fluorescent orange hair… you name it, someone’s got it. There are things you can do to your hair also: cut it, dye it, wash it, set it on fire… (I don’t recommend that last one.) Japanese has quite the vocabulary for hair, so let’s take a look!