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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
The newsletter is up, you’re on the blog, which means the podcast is directly below:
I wrote about a funny Japanese word: 謎 (nazo, mystery). I was inspired to look at 謎 because I was curious about the effect that a viral video from the late 2000s had (or didn’t have) on the career of comedian/actor Katagiri Jin. There’s not much out there, to be honest. All of the original posts of the video were taken down from YouTube due to copyright strikes, so we’ve lost the conversation in those comments. I did manage to find this Reddit post from 2011, which is super interesting and shows that the video had an impact on Redditors at least, and I think this is emblematic of the internet at that point in time. We were shifting from an internet where Homestar Runner thrived to an in-between state as YouTube was getting going but before Vine or TikTok were even imaginable.
And I don’t think the video had much of an impact on Japanese fans. I’m sure many enjoyed the skits, but Katagiri is much more defined by his time in Rahmens and his podcast エレ片のポッ. The skit isn’t even mentioned in the longform blog post I found that examines Katagiri’s career. That article is worth a read. I’m not sure I understood 100% of it, but the thesis is pretty clear and, I think, on point. Worth a read.
The next chapter (and the final post for this year’s Murakami Fest) is titled “London” (ロンドン), and it’s one of the most interesting chapters in the book so far. The past few chapters have all been relatively short and somewhat focused, so it’s interesting that this longer chapter covers a month-long period that Murakami spends alone in London writing Dance Dance Dance while his wife is back in Japan. Perhaps this makes sense. Just as Murakami devotes long sections of his novels to protagonists spending time by themselves, he also goes into great detail about his own time alone in his memoir:
I just kind of ended up in London, as it were. My wife had something to attend and went back to Japan for a while via London, so I went to see her off. Which is how I ended up staying there for around a month from the start of March until the end, and during that period I was cooped up in my room working and hardly spoke with anyone. Whenever I’m writing a full-length novel, that’s almost always the case, but this time I didn’t ever feel a particular need to talk with anyone. So for me, London is a quiet, taciturn city. It left that impression deep within me.
He looks at three apartments and ends up in a small studio right on Abbey Road, which seems extremely fitting for someone who’d just published a bestseller titled Norwegian Wood:
I finished writing the novel Dance Dance Dance in this room. Day after day I typed away at word processor while listening to music on my tape player and looking out the window at Abbey Road. The heater in this apartment worked incredibly well; everyone outside was still wearing coats, but inside I was sweating in a T-shirt and shorts. Sometimes I had to stick my head out the window into the air above Abbey Road to cool myself down.
Part of the reason he spends so much time alone is because he struggles with the language. He notes that the accent is frequently tough to understand and that Brits, unlike Americans, don’t offer to repeat themselves and slow down. After he writes all day, he runs in Regent’s Park for an hour, cooks himself dinner, and then reads Jack London or goes to see movies and concerts.
He notes the movies: A Time to Die (which Murakami mistakenly calls A Time for Dying), Withnail and I, Killing Time (Poussière d’ange), the six-hour epic Little Doritt.
He also spends this long chapter providing detailed commentary on the concerts and operas. The Royal Philharmonic with Icelandic composer Vladimir Ashkenazy and his son Vovka: meh. (Murakami notes he previously saw Vovka in Athens.) A piano concerto by Stephen Kovacevich at Queen Elizabeth Hall: Schubert, good; Beethoven, boring. Sir Neville Marinner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields: impressive if a little clean and refined. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd: both excellent. And one jazz concert by Blossom Dearie at the now defunct Pizza on the Park: charming.
After finishing the novel, he takes one short trip to Bath where he rents a bike and cycles the 10 miles to Castle Combe. The hotels there are full, so he’s forced to head to the next village, where it looks like he may have stayed at The White Hart in Ford on Palm Sunday. The bike is in poor condition, and on the way back he’s forced to walk it the last five kilometers.
At the end of the chapter, we get a very small closing section about submitting the novel, which feels very different from his submission of Norwegian Wood:
I went to the post office and sent a printed copy of my novel manuscript to Tokyo (avoiding the Italian postal system was another reason I came to London) before returning to Rome alone at the end of March.
So between Norwegian Wood and Dance Dance Dance, Murakami shifts from handwritten manuscript submissions to printed copies. Remember, he rewrote a second draft of Norwegian Wood completely by hand before delivering it in person in Bologna.
Given Murakami’s immediate moonshot into celebrity-level success after Norwegian Wood, perhaps it’s a fitting shift, from small, cold apartments across the Mediterranean while writing that novel, to a toasty London flat where he spent his evenings at concerts and operas.
This book has its ups and downs, but it’s fascinating throughout, and I can’t wait to read more. That’s it for Murakami Fest 2025. I may be posting other pieces throughout the year, but definitely check back in 2026 for more.
This month I wrote about いただき (itadaki). Yes, just いただき. I had this bizarre internal sense that いただき was a more commonly used, potentially more natural phrase when thanking someone for something they did, and I ended up being able to confirm this hunch with some (very unscientific) data.
I was reminded once again, however, of exactly how important context is for something even as simple as a phrase like 買ってもらった (katte moratta).
While digging through the internet as I was writing, I stumbled upon a Yahoo Chiebukuro post showing the three meanings verbs of receiving can take:
1. They went and bought something (in place of me going and buying it) 2. I received what they bought (= a present) 3. I received them buying (something that I owned)
Who is buying what where and from/for whom can really vary! And this phrase can mean all of these things. It’s never quite as simple as you’d hope. Context is queen/king.
And of course, ironically, I found an example of くださり that is topically relevant to podcast content. I introduced the website/app Jimoty on the podcast this month as a convenient way to get rid of stuff for free in Japan (assuming you live in a major metropolis), and I was looking through my reviews out of curiosity. I only have one review, but it’s a five star review from when I bought a used Instant Pot just after moving to Osaka.
Here’s the review:
雨の中取りに来てくださりありがとうございました！
Thanks for coming to pick up (the Instant Pot) in the rain!
So perhaps this gives us additional content. いただき is the perfect level of politeness for workplace thanks, while くださり is a slightly heightened casual politeness, one half rank above くださって? That’s the best that I can do right now. In the end, you can keep using くださって without any real penalty. Your point will be made and it will be polite. So don’t sweat any of this too much.
