Keep on keepin’ on

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The newsletter is up as is the podcast:

The content is new this month, and I’m looking at process, specifically the importance of goal setting and right sizing those goals in order to maintain 継続 (keizoku, continuity).

I’m always in danger of misremembering my own origin story, which is why it’s good I have notes from 17 years ago, which is when Murakami published 1Q84. My writing then is that I first read a novel at the pace of five pages a day, which is more than the one or two pages that I sometimes have cited to beginner Japanese students. Looking back, five feels correct and would have been the right pace to get through two novels in one semester. Two pages a day would have taken 150 or so days to get through the two novels I read, which would have been much longer than the single semester I had.

My other comments on that post are also informative, although I don’t feel like Tsushima Yuko’s writing helped with my speaking quite as much as Murakami. She’s a denser, less conversational writer (which I fully mean as an insult to Murakami).

I do wish I would’ve taken this 多読 (tadoku) approach much sooner and that I had been a little more proactive about finding right-sized reading material, especially during my first three years of study. It wasn’t until that fourth year studying abroad that I really started to take off the floaties and swim in the deep end. There’s so much more available online now, just in terms of sheer information in addition to actual content. It’s never been a better time to self study.

Speaking of self study, I took the JLPT N5 in July. I’m starting a project to go through the JLPT and see how things feel these days as a way to mark 20 years since I passed 一級, which was the highest level before they split the test into five levels. I put all these comments at the beginning of the podcast for anyone who only wanted to listen to that section.

The Tale of Kaho

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Murakami’s latest novel—The Tale of Kaho—comes out tomorrow in Japan, and he did me the biggest favor in the world by publishing it as a series of stories and novellas over the past three years. I’ve had a chance to read and digest these (even if I had to scramble because I didn’t realize he’d published the third of the series or that he revised the first story!), and I put my thoughts up on Medium.

I’m planning to put out a podcast soon, hopefully this weekend, so I’ll probably update this post with that link. I don’t think I’ll have finished the book yet, but I’ll have a good idea of what if any revisions or additions he made even with a pretty quick glance.

I hope that he adds something because as it currently stands, Kaho’s story is not very good.

幸いなことに

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The newsletter is up and the podcast is live:

On even months moving forward, in the interest of saving myself some time that I can bank for other projects (like writing reviews of Murakami, etc.), I’ll be finding something from my blog archive to look at.

I got really lucky and stumbled on a couple of posts about Yahoo Chiebukuro, but the real discovery was a contributor’s definition of 幸い (saiwai, happy/pleased). This gave me the opportunity to get into one of the most useful sentences in the Japanese business world that I would guess is the most frequent way of making a polite request in Japanese. I won’t spoil it here. Go give it a read.

I will note one other very nice usage for 幸い. One of the other definitions is “lucky,” and the standard sentence structure with this meaning is 幸いなことに X (Saiwai na koto ni X, Luckily/Fortunately, X).

I went looking for usage examples on Twitter, as I have often in the past, but this month I found that the search function has degraded significantly. I don’t use Twitter anymore, but I maintain my account there (on private) so I can access one of the largest corpuses of Japanese language in existence. It was especially effective at tracking down usage examples because quote searches were super reliable, but that’s no longer the case. Searches aren’t turning up quoted text any longer, although other users on BlueSky reported varying results.

One user did share that you can use Google to search on Twitter by adding “site:x.com” to a search and then adding the quoted material. This appears to work! Even if it makes combing through the results much more difficult and time consuming.

At any rate, I turned up this nice example from shogi player Katō Hifumi who passed away earlier this year but posted this back in 2017 (when he was 77), noting that he feels fortunate not to have felt any effect of getting older:

A screenshot of a tweet from shogi player Katō Hifumi in 2017 that reads "ひふみんは幸いなことに ７７歳を迎えた現在も 体力、気力、知力、情熱、意欲、食欲、そのいずれにも限界や衰えを、微塵も感じないのです。 神様から贈られた才能を存分に発揮し得る環境を与えられている以上、それを最大限に活かすべく生きてゆくことは、ひととして当然の務めではないでしょうか？".

And here’s a lighter example of a Threads user fortunate to find less damage than expected from some rainy weather:

A screenshot of a Threads post with photos of greenery and flowers in a back yard and a cat lying on the ground with text that reads "台風が通り過ぎて晴れ上がった夕方、畑に様子を見に... 幸いなことに線状降雨帯に遭わず風も思ったほど強くなかったので大きな被害はなく、グーちゃんが元気に走り回っていました（^^）。".

Back in December 2023 I did a quick look at how all the social media platforms handle searching for Japanese text. Sad to see Twitter degrade so far, but 幸いなことに Google-kun can lend us a hand.

生成AI

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The newsletter is up, and the podcast is live:

It was time for me to mention something about generative AI and language learning. Things have changed so dramatically from when I started studying Japanese 25 years ago, and even at that point I think it was already unrecognizable to people who started studying 50 years ago. Electronic dictionaries and computers must have felt like a total cheat code that would undermine students’ ability to learn the language. And I’m sure it has reduced the number of non-native speakers who are writing kanji at a decent level. Heck, the Nikkei reported on Japanese feeling unable to write kanji back in 2012.

But the change does seem to be speeding up. SRS was an interesting mix to the loop, and I’d argue a beneficial one that has probably contributed to improved learning outcomes, but technologies like SRS and electronic dictionaries/computers seem different from generative AI. An electronic dictionary or SRS isn’t looking to replace the fundamental effort of doing the language. They do ease some friction, but you could say the same thing about a kanji dictionary, which I guess some old Japan hands must’ve been cursing back in the nineteenth century: “Why look up a kanji when you could spend decades living on a small island off the coast of Nagasaki to truly understand the language?”

AI does the language for students. It asks the question, “Why learn the language at all?” And when students get stuck and reach for a gen AI solution, they are implicitly answering that question with, “I don’t need to learn the language.”

I would caution students (especially new students) to be extremely careful with your use of generative AI. Can you avoid using it for at least the first three years of study? If I were a Japanese teacher, that’s what I would do to challenge my students. Commit to the language for three years without any AI assistance at the very least. Give yourself a strong foundation, and understand what it means to fail and the necessity of failure to build future success.

Reassess after three years, and at that point, you might find that you’re comfortable with the pain of language study and don’t need AI after all.

改めて and 及び

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The newsletter is online and the podcast is up!

I wrote about 改めて (aratamete), which is really just a fancy way of saying また (mata, again)…to a certain extent. And while doing the podcast, I was reminded of the Japanese word 及び (oyobi) which I wrote about back in 2009. This was back when I was posting three times a week and I was in my early 20s, so the content is predictably…a bit thin. But still accurate!

While the verb 及ぶ (oyobu) has several uses—not all of which I can use actively, I’ll admit—the word 及び functions essentially as a particle that signals 並列 (heiretsu, arranging in a line/parallel). It’s mostly (only?) used in written Japanese, especially in formal documentation, so you really only need to be able to recognize it.

This got me thinking about the kinds of Japanese I have access to passively and actively, and I was a bit forlorn at the idea that I have no voice in Japanese. I can speak and do Japanese to a great degree, especially passively, but I’m not sure if I’ve developed the ability to communicate in a way that conveys my personality in the same way that I have with English. I do think my spoken Japanese is fine, so I’m mostly thinking about written Japanese here. I’ve written previously about the divide between 敬体 (keitai, distal style) and 常体 (jōtai, direct style) back in December 2022, and I think I’ve always been on the 敬体 side of that equation. A little more cautious and soft spoken, polite and neutral in terms of the spoken language, but casual in terms of the written language. I’m curious to develop more of my own style in 常体 somehow. Not that I plan to be using 及び anytime soon. That’s a level of formality and tightness reserved for city hall bureaucrats. But I would be curious to try 常体 on for size.

The main issue is that I wrote myself into…whatever this is *gestures at 18 years of online writing in English*…just by writing a lot. I do strongly believe in free writing to develop ideas and then editing to give writing meaning and purpose, but it does seem like 常体 is not something that would work for? Or maybe it could? Stay tuned. If I can somehow fit one more thing in, I might try and make it happen.

できましたら、改めて報告いたします。

事項 and Kobe Recommendations

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The newsletter is online, and the podcast is live:

This month, I wrote about 事項 (jikō) and about how it’s essentially meaningless on its own. Because it combines with so many other words, however, it’s one of the most useful nouns in Japanese. I wrote 3,000+ words over on the newsletter, so I won’t add anything here. Go give it a look.

This month on the podcast, I also have my recommendations for Kobe. I previously wrote about Osaka and Kyoto, so Kobe made sense, and I think I’ve got some good spots to share. I don’t want to gatekeep them, but I’m also hesitant to put them directly on the blog, so I’ll keep them audio only. Go give them a listen if you’re interested in a whirlwind tour of Ashiya and Kobe fueled by caffeine and rum.

初めて言われました

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The newsletter is online! This month I wrote about the nice, efficient phrase 初めて言われました (Hajimete iwaremashita, That’s the first time anyone has said that about me). I think it’s potentially a nice way to gain a clearer understanding of the Japanese passive form. Give the podcast a listen where I go into further detail:

Passive was one of the very first things that I wrote about when I started How to Japanese back in 2008 (please ignore the fact that I refer to it as a “tense,” thank you!), and I mentioned a similar expression よく言われます (Yoku iwaremasu, Everyone says that about me) in my August 2011 Japan Times article about humor.

Looking at よく言われます and 初めて言われました together, it does seem like “someone”/“everyone”/“no one” can be edited out of many Japanese phrases and replaced with/implied by a passive verb. Because these people aren’t specific people, and because there’s no need to emphasize the everyone- or no-one-ness of the situation, there’s no need to say 誰も (dare mo, everyone/no one).

This holds true for one of the examples I shared in my 2008 blog post: カンチョウされた！ (Kanchō sareta!, Some kid poked me in the butt!) This is a great example of the “adversative passive.” The passive implies “Not only was I poked in the butt, I did not enjoy this and suffered this happening to my person.” If you’re sharing this story with someone, maybe it doesn’t matter which kid it was; you’re just trying to communicate how you were harmed, so “Some kid poked me in the butt!” is fine. No specificity needed.

But we can add specificity if we need to, of course. All we have to do is mark the kid with に (ni). 太郎にカンチョウされた！ (Tarō ni kanchō sareta!, Tarō poked me in the butt!).

Speaking of カンチョウ, has Japan grown up a little? Maybe I just haven’t spent much time around kids or haven’t been watching enough Japanese comedy shows, but I feel like it’s much less a cultural “thing” than it was when I first visited Japan in the early 2000s.

Getting back to the point, I’d say that passive is probably the single most useful form to master in Japanese (and I might lump in いただく (itadaku)・もらう (morau) in there alongside passive because they really are similar in many ways) to take you to the next level and give you access to more natural expressions. It’s difficult to imagine not using it once you get it.

御社・弊社

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Happy New Year, all! As you might have gathered from last month’s post, 2025 was an eventful year, and fortunately it ended as smoothly as I could have hoped. The Japanese New Year’s holiday was excellent, as usual (as I recommended in the podcast last month), and I’m feeling recharged and ready to write.

I thought I’d give myself an easy initial project for the newsletter by starting with another installment of “impossible pairs.” 御社 (onsha, your company) and 弊社 (heisha, my/our company) are two words that I’ve finally come to terms with. They’re what I like to call “replacement pronouns,” which are words that are not “traditional” pronouns as we think of them in English but function as pronouns in Japanese.

Take a listen to the podcast:

I tried to think of other words that also fit into this category, but wasn’t able to think up any on my own other than additional combinations with 御 and 弊. 社 means company, and these can be attached to other kanji for different kinds of organizations and then be used in a similar fashion.

Weblio gives these examples:

弊屋 (heioku) – our (decrepit and humble) house
弊誌 (heishi) – our (unknown and humble) magazine/newspaper
弊店 (heiten) – our (unsightly and humble) store

These can all function as I/we in sentences.

It looks like 御 also works with at least 詩 and 店, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a number of other combinations that work with these characters.

After pitching my “replacement pronouns” idea to my wife, she suggested that 当, which I wrote about in the November newsletter, might fit this category. You can attach it to all sorts words that can in turn be used in place of “we” to refer to a group:

当グループ (tō-gurūpu) – our/this group
当校 (tōkō) – our/this school
当社 (tōsha) – our/this company
当行 (tōkō) – our/this bank

More generally, 当方 (tōhō, I/we) and 先方 (senpō, other party/side) are somewhat related but are closer to こちら (kochira, here/I/we) and そちら (sochira, there/you), which function as actual pronouns. These are effectively opposites: 当方 is used externally to refer to oneself/one’s company, while 先方 is used internally to refer to a third-party partner.

The only other words my wife suggested were 小職 (shōshoku, this government staff/I/me) and potentially 小生 (shōsei, I/me), although the former to me feels more along these lines.

I’m sure there are others I’m just not thinking of. Is there anything else that might work? I do feel like helping English speakers find the natural pronouns of Japanese is a cheat code to helping them feel more comfortable with the language.

育休

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Take a look at the newsletter for more details, but I’m taking the month off. I wrote about some of my favorite writing I’ve done since I started keeping How to Japanese way back in 2008, so head over there to take a look. Or you can just look over to the right and click on any month to see the archive if you’d like to read through randomly or chronologically.

Sometimes I’m amazed this site has lasted as long as it has, purely from a tech perspective. I’m not the savviest, but I managed to do a few tricks here and there, notably when I switched over to an official WordPress build from another platform. More recently, I neglected my Google Analytics and only just got it working again over the past week, so I have a better sense of where traffic is coming from and what posts people are looking at. Spoiler alert: The keyword searches are as depressing as you’d expect. I don’t have enough data at this point, so after a few months, maybe I’ll write something about the most accessed posts on the site.

I’ve got no plans to change anything about my current writing approach. Once a month on the newsletter and once a month here feels sustainable. I do have two somewhat challenging goals:

1. Get the newsletter on a self-hosted version of Ghost.

Currently I’m on a managed hosting situation, which is actually really convenient and pretty affordable. I can’t decide whether it would be worth it to self host. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, in terms of the hosting itself, getting support for email, making sure everything is connected properly. It might actually cost more to do this. I think I’d also need some help, so if anyone has any resources or would be able to train me, please do reach out.

2. Find a way to archive the site long term.

This is a bit dark to think about, but I wonder about a long, long-term solution to ensure my writing stays online. Maybe this is a fruitless, hopeless thing to want. Maybe our digital writing is just like most paper writing: victim to the whims of time (and algorithms) and likely to disappear in the end. I’m curious about static sites and archiving, so if anyone has any info on those, please do share. I feel like there’s a potential business opportunity for a service that you could pay into over time that would then archive your site or make it a static site at any point you specified. Kind of like the opposite of an annuity or something.

Hope you all have an excellent holiday season. I’m looking forward to an obligation-free (in terms of work and writing) New Year’s. See you all in January. Until then, find me elsewhere on social media.

当日

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This month I wrote about a word that was rattling around in my head earlier this year. 当日 (tōjitsu, the day it happened/will happen).

I started by looking for some usage examples in Aozora but didn’t want to take up too much space in the newsletter, so I thought I’d look at those here.

I found two examples that might be helpful, both by protagonists using 当日 to narrate past events. Here’s a sentence from writing from Sakaguchi Ango titled 小林さんと私のツキアイ (My Relationship with Kobayashi-san):

私は当夜のことを全てよく記憶しているが、それは当日私が腹をこわして酒がのめなくて、一同の酒宴をただ一人傍観したからである。

I remember everything from the evening of the event very well, and that’s due to the fact that my stomach was upset that day and I couldn’t drink so I spent the entirety of the party just observing people.

“that day” here is 当日, but it carries with it a bit more implication than その日 would. And actually in this sentence we can also see 当夜 (tōya, that night/the night in consideration). Pretty cool how 当 can be attached to so many different things and immediately help clarify relationships within time and context.

And here’s Akutagawa Ryunosuke in 野呂松人形 (Noroma Dolls):

当日、僕は車で、その催しがある日暮里のある人の別荘へ行った。

That day, I went to the person’s vacation home in Nippori where the event was being held.

It’s nice to see that you can just set 当日 there at the beginning of a sentence and immediately orient a reader. I think it’s important to note that it doesn’t even need a particle. 当日は would have a different implication from 当日.

In the newsletter I take a look at the flexibility of 当日. It can be a date either in the future or in the past. These two examples are from the past, but depending on the context, it can easily be something two days, two weeks, or two months from now.