Romaji to Hiragana: Why this mind-switch is so vital (even for more advanced learners)

Japanese immersion
Romaji to hiragana
Japanese romaji vs Western-style. No system can exactly represent actual Japanese.

Making the mental switch from romaji to hiragana is vitally important.

This may seem like advice directed at beginners, and it is important for them. However, what I have to say is important for serious immersion Japanese learners at all levels, so I would ask even more advanced learners to stay with me and read this article.

Some people have suggested that it would be all right to learn Japanese, at least at first, using only romaji. Most serious Japanese learners disparage the use of romaji but often without explaining exactly why. I am going to start by explaining why it is so important to make the mind-switch from romaji to hiragana and actually think in kana.

When thinking about the meanings of words we should, and as we advance inevitably will, start thinking in kanji. However, when we think of the sounds of words we need to think in kana, because kana are precisely adapted to expressing the Japanese sounds in the way Japanese people perceive them.

Many more advanced learners, even after they have become fluent readers of Japanese, do not fully break the mental link between Japanese sounds and romaji. They have not fully switched from romaji to hiragana in their minds. We are going to talk about why this happens and what can be done about it. But first of all, let’s look at why it matters.

Why we need to mind-switch from romaji to hiragana

What is wrong with romaji in the first place?

Very simply the fact that it does not accurately represent the sounds of Japanese. If we continue to think that あ=a, し=shi, ふ=fu (or hu, depending which system of romaji you use), we will have a fundamental misconception about Japanese sounds.

Thinking in kana will not automatically teach good Japanese pronunciation, but thinking in romaji will make it much harder.

How Romaji is the HIdden Enemy of your Japanese

There are different systems of romaji transliteration and all of them have faults. The reason there are several is that it is a trade-off between one set of faults or another. The Hepburn system (which is currently the most usual in the West) is not the one commonly used in Japan. In some ways it is a good system and in others it perpetuates some very wrong ideas about the kana structure.

When you think about it, it is actually not possible for romaji to represent Japanese sounds accurately because romaji itself does not have fixed sound-values.

If a North American speaker pronounces the word ほとんど as if it were a word spelled “hotondo”, what comes out is something more like はたあんど. In traditional standard British English, the Japanese あ sound is closer to the short “u” than to most of the various sounds that “a” makes in English. And so on.

So this is the first reason for switching from romaji to hiragana. We need as early as possible to start associating Japanese sounds with Japanese characters and cutting out the intermediary of Roman characters, which necessarily misrepresent the sounds as ones we are familiar with in English.

The second reason is that romaji, and especially the usually-used Hepburn system, misrepresents how Japanese people think about kana and this actually gives a false idea of many points of grammar. A lot of the serious problems I correct in Unlocking Japanese and my grammar video lessons have their origin in romaji-thinking.

For example, on the Wikipedia article on Japanese verb conjugation we are told that:

The eba provisional conditional form is characterized by the final -u becoming -eba for all verbs (with the semi-exception of -tsu verbs becoming -teba).

But つ-verbs becoming てば is not any kind of exception. It is 100% regular  (watch this video to see exactly how this all works), and the apparent “semi-exception” only exists in Hepburn Romaji.

In a variety of ways, thinking in romaji causes us to see Japanese in ways that are a) different from how Japanese people see it, and b) an impediment to understanding how the language actually works.

In the Wikipedia example above, instead of thinking in terms of “the final u becoming -eba” (a purely romaji-based concept) we should be saying that the final う-row kana becomes the equivalent え-row kana plus ば. And then there are no exceptions, semi or otherwise, and we are seeing the language the way it actually is, instead of through romaji glasses.

Romaji to hiragana: still a problem for more advanced learners?

“But I know hiragana inside out. I read Japanese books all the time,” the more advanced learner may say.

Yes, I do too. But I have caught myself, and other advanced learners, making little errors that indicate that we are still thinking somewhat in romaji. I have puzzled over why this may be. After all, we left romaji behind a long time ago.

Didn’t we?

Well, in a way we might not have. First we learned the sounds of Japanese as romaji equivalents. But perhaps more importantly, we type Japanese in romaji every day.

Now this may be less important if you hand-write Japanese a lot (perhaps in school). But many of us hardly hand-write at all in this electronic age, and we have argued that it may not be necessary.

However, if we mostly type Japanese on a keyboard via romaji, without even being aware of it, we are continually maintaining and strengthening the romaji to hiragana link.

Especially if we touch-type, this is largely subconscious. But we may actually have a much stronger mental connection to how the kana are made up from romaji than how they are made up in themselves.

When you try inputting kana directly (say putting your name in a DS game) you can find yourself wondering momentarily where the “cha” character is before remembering that you want ち plus ゃ. Of course you know ちゃ instantly when you see it written, but it isn’t the way you are used to inputting it.

This does have an effect on how you think about Japanese. I suspect the author of the Wikipedia article cited above was advanced in Japanese, but she was still thinking in romaji-linked patterns.

As full-immersion learners, we want to complete the romaji to hiragana mind-switch and break the mental romaji link.

Because of the strong subliminal influence of the keyboard in this process, I have been experimenting with typing directly in kana on my computer. This is possible with a Western keyboard (I will show you how to make it easy), and I have found it much easier than I imagined to re-learn touch-typing with a completely different keyboard layout.

Whether you want to do it or not is another matter. Most Japanese people type kana via romaji, but they are thinking in kana to begin with, so it doesn’t pose a problem for their Japanese! (It might adversely affect their relation to kana for English, but then they primarily use romaji as a minor part of Japanese).

In my next article I share my experience of typing on a kana keyboard and how it meshes with the Japanese learning process. Plus tips on how to go about it if you want to try→

The Best Way to Learn Japanese

Japanese immersion

best way to learn japanesePeople often ask what is the best way to learn Japanese. It is an important question, because learning Japanese is not a quick process whatever method one uses.

One is sinking many, many hours into it, so it is natural to want to be sure that one is using those hours effectively.

This leads some people to spend more time reading up on methods than actually learning the language, or in some cases it leads people to keep changing methods in case the current one isn’t the best way to learn Japanese.

I really understand this. I went through the same kind of doubts and worries early in my Japanese journey, but I discovered something that can eliminate the whole anxiety of not knowing which is the best method.

I am going to explain why the method I chose works so well, but also, and perhaps more importantly, why, whether it is the best or not, it can remove the whole anxiety surrounding the question of the best way to learn Japanese.

In a nutshell, the best way to learn Japanese is to use and enjoy it. Studying only takes you so far, which is why people can study the language for years and pass exams without becoming proficient in practical terms.

How the brain learns language

There are reasons for this. At one time scientists thought that there was a particular part of the brain that handles language. More recently, though, it appears that the language function is distributed over many parts of the brain. This is because language (not a particular language, but the language-function) is hard wired into the brain.

What this means in turn is that words and experience are intimately bound together. To the brain, saying “It’s been a rough day” and touching sandpaper are somewhat similar sensations.

In other words, language and experience are intimately bound together. Which is why learning words from abstract “vocabulary lists” is one of the least efficient ways we can learn. The brain is not forming sensory or emotional connections with the words.

The best way to learn Japanese is to be in Japan, interacting and using the language for everything all the time. That way the brain builds up all the natural associations of words and grammar with things and experiences that make up true knowledge of any language.

Of course, many of us don’t have the option of being in Japan (and if we are there in an English-teaching environment we still may not have the option of true immersion).

In that case the second-best way is the best way to go.

What is the second-best way?

The answer to that should be obvious.

Getting as near to the best way as possible!

Even if you can’t have every experience in Japanese, you can create a “Japanese zone” in your life where you experience in Japanese.

As you know, when you become involved in a book or an anime, it is an experience. You are seeing and doing things, even though at second hand. You are experiencing emotions, hopes, fears from fantasy adventures to everyday life. Japanese acquired this way works in the brain very similarly to the way “real” language-experience does.

If you communicate and interact in Japanese: not just “practising” but actually discussing things that really interest you in themselves and forming relationships in Japanese, then language is working in your mind like real language and not just “play-language” or “study-language”.

The brain treats real language very differently from the way it treats “game-systems” like algebra or chess or language-study. Real language operates all over the brain, becoming part of its way of processing everything else.

How to go about creating real immersion for your brain is essentially the theme of this site and we have a lot of information on it. You can start from here if you decide to.

Eliminating the “best way to learn Japanese” worry

I think what we have said above is convincing.

And I think it is convincing because it is true.

But…

There are a lot of other ways of learning Japanese online and many of them claim to be the best. Most of them can work (there are a few notable exceptions). You may be drawn to some of them at some time and wonder if they aren’t the best way to learn Japanese.

Of course, I believe immersion is the best way to learn Japanese. At least for some people. But whether it is or isn’t, it is the way to stop worrying about what is the best way of learning Japanese.

Why? What do I mean by that?

I mean that the whole worry about “the best way to learn Japanese” comes from the fact that you are sinking hours into studying the language, and naturally you want to be sure that you aren’t wasting time by using a less effective method.

But true immersion does away with all that.

It does away with the whole “studying Japanese” concept. It does away with the idea that you spend countless study-hours with 10,000 sentences or drill-books or Remembering the Kanji or  Memrise or anything else in the hope that one magical day you will know enough to really use and enjoy Japanese.

You can see why people worry about whether their current method is the best way to learn Japanese.

It is an act of faith.

If I do enough of this grueling study I will reap the Great Reward.

But what if I don’t? What if I am on the wrong path?

You can’t know.

You can be told that someone else became native-level fluent in X-months using Y-supermethod. But you don’t know if that person is being 100% honest with you (or himself). Nor do you know if he isn’t some kind of prodigy who just happens to be very good at languages (and whatever anyone says, such people do exist). Nor do you know if the method that worked for this person is the one that will work for you. People learn differently.

So how can you find out what really is the best way of learning Japanese?

I don’t know if you can. But what you can do is do away with this whole act-of-faith approach.

When you do that, the whole “best way of learning Japanese” approach suddenly becomes irrelevant.

When you were picking up your native language as a small child you weren’t worrying about the best method of learning it. You weren’t even particularly concerned with learning the language at all. You were concerned with getting on with life. You were concerned with expressing your thoughts, enjoying movies, understanding what people were saying.

That wasn’t called “language study”. That was called “living”.

Our approach is to do the same thing with Japanese.

You do need to learn some basic grammar. We show you how to do this. It doesn’t have to be a lot. The rest you will pick up as you go along.

At this stage you don’t need to worry about the best way of learning Japanese. Learning basic grammar is very straightforward and there is no mystery about the fact that you are learning it.

Once you have learned the basics you start using Japanese. Watching Japanese-subtitled anime, reading for-Japanese-children’s books, playing video games in Japanese, communicating in Japanese.

This isn’t an easy, no-work method. It is hard, especially at first. All methods are hard. But as you ease into it, it is fun. You enjoy the anime. You enjoy the games. You enjoy reading. You start to interact with people in Japanese. You start to carve out an area of your life where Japanese is Language. The only language.

I believe this is the best and most natural way of learning Japanese. But whether it is or whether it isn’t, can you see how it has made the whole worry over “the best way to learn Japanese” irrelevant?

This is not an act-of-faith method. You aren’t slogging away at flashcards, classes, Kanji books, SRS sites etc in the hope that one day you will be able to use Japanese.

You are using Japanese right now.

Slowly at first. Strenuously at first. But you are using it. And every day you use it, it gets easier and more fun.

There is no mystery here. There is no waiting for the “destination” and hoping you didn’t board the wrong train. The destination is here, now.  What you are doing is learning to get around that destination. First of all crawling like a small baby. Then standing up, holding onto the legs of chairs. Then being able to toddle.

It’s a long job. Any method is a long job. Get-fluent-quick schemes don’t work, or only work for a certain kind of person (and a certain very limited definition of “fluent”). Really learning a language takes time. It takes children time to learn their native language. Many, many, many “study hours”.

Except that they don’t call them “study hours”.

And neither will you.

They call it “living”.

And so will you.

Is this the best way to learn Japanese? I think so, but I can’t prove it and I could be wrong.

I don’t really care.

And neither will you.

The real point is: suppose doing 10,000 sentences and learning 2,000 kanji in the abstract were “the best way”.

Suppose spending every night working through drill-books were the best way.

Would I do it?

No.

First of all, no one really knows whether or not they are the best way for any given individual.

But more importantly, I don’t want to put off using and living Japanese into some future that may or may not arrive.

If I was doing that I probably would be feeling desperate about whether all this slog was the best way to learn Japanese. It is like walking blindfold and just praying you are headed in the right direction.

Right from the first few months I was starting to use Japanese. It wasn’t a thing that would happen one day if I was diligent enough. It was something that was happening right now if I was diligent enough.

(That’s right, I’m afraid we can’t skip the diligence part)

Other approaches make using and enjoying Japanese a future-thing. True immersion makes it a now-thing.

And you know that the more you do it, the better it gets. You learn more words. You learn more of the ways that words are put together (“grammar”). Every single thing that you watch or read or play puts you one step further forward than the last one.

But you don’t need to worry about “the best way to learn Japanese” any more than a growing child needs to worry about the best way to learn her language.

To get started with real immersion, take a look at these articles:

How to Learn Japanese Online – a basic introduction

Japanese Immersion: How to Get Started

Yatta vs Yokatta: What do they mean?

Japanese word meanings
Yatta and yokatta: What's the difference?
Yatta and yokatta: What’s the difference?

Two words you often hear in anime are Yatta! and Yokatta. They both express positive feelings, but the words are in fact unrelated and have different meanings.

Yatta is the past tense of the word yaru, to do. So when you hear someone shout Yatta! its primary meaning is “We did it!” or “I did it!”

So whether you hit the jackpot on a fruit machine or your team defeats the universe-eating monster, you are entitled to shout Yatta!

However, the meaning has extended from the literal sense of the word. For example, when I was in Japan and my host mother announced that she was making hotcakes, my little host sisters shouted Yatta!

In this case it wasn’t because they had done anything or even because their mother had (the hotcakes weren’t made yet) but because the word can extend beyond its literal meaning to a general cry of triumph or delight.

Yokatta is the past tense of ii, which means good. Ii is one of the very few irregular words in Japanese. The older form of ii is yoi (which is still often used), and the only irregularity is that whenever ii is conjugated in any way it reverts to being yoi. So the past tense of ii isn’t ikatta but yokatta.

So the meaning of yokatta is clear enough. It means “it was good”. Like yatta, it is often used for things that we don’t necessarily consider to be “past” in English. But when you think about it, the Japanese is logical. Something has to have already happened before we can know whether it was good or not.

Yokatta can be used in many different situations to express relief or happiness at the way things have turned out.

A very common expression in anime is

無事でよかった
buji de yokatta

Buji means literally “without incident” but usually has the sense of having arrived somewhere or done something safely or unhurt.

So buji de yokatta means “it was good that you are unhurt”. That puts the past tense in a slightly different place from where English would put it but the sense is the same as “I’m glad you weren’t hurt”.

Yokatta can express happiness in getting a present, passing an exam, or just about anything, but always the root sense is the same: “The way things turned out is good”.

As you have probably already realized, the reason the words look somewhat similar is that they both use the plain past ending -atta.

So, to put it all in a nutshell, when you hand your perfect test result to your mother, you say Yatta! and she says Yokatta.

Yurusanai! What it really means.

Japanese word meanings

yurusanai-meaningYurusanai or yurusenai is often used in manga and anime. Often said with a similarly angry tone, it can be confused with urusai, but it is a completely different word with a very different meaning.

Yurusanai is often translated as “I won’t forgive you”. This is a reasonable translation in some cases, but often falls rather short of the full meaning.

The term is often heard when a hero makes a stand against a villain who is doing something unforgivable. However, the sense of the phrase in this case is often closer to:

I won’t let you do this.

The reason for the difficulty is that word 許す yurusu means both “to forgive” and “to allow” and also has an implication of “to give up”. So that shouted yurusanai (the negative form of yurusu) means at once “I won’t forgive you” and “I won’t let you do this” with overtones of “I won’t give up”.

This makes it a very powerful expression in these circumstances, and one that has no brief and direct English translation.

Note: this word is sometimes confused with Urusai, which also tends to be angry but is quite different.

When a word combines several meanings, those meanings are often closely entwined in the mind of the speaker. You may have noticed that Germans speaking English sometimes say “happy” when they mean “lucky”. That is because the German word Gluck means both happiness and luck, so that the two concepts are more closely bound up in the German mind than in the English.

The same is true of the concepts of allowing and forgiving in the word yurusanai. The resulting mixture gives a powerful expression in the negative, which is why it is so often used.

Sometimes you will hear yurusenai in place of yurusanai. The only difference here is that yurusenai means “I can’t allow/forgive” rather than “I won’t”.

Because it tends to be spoken in anger, the word is usually used in the plain form. However, there are occasions when it is used in the polite form, sometimes to great effect.

Cure Beauty’s first appearance in Smile Precure is prefaced by her ojousama civilian persona facing down an evil witch who has downed all the current Precures.

Immediately before her debut transformation, she makes a defiant but dignified speech ending with the words:

わたくし、青木らいかが　ゆるしません。
watakushi, Aoki Reika ga yurushimasen.
I, Reika Aoki, will not forgive you/allow this.

This unusual (for anime) use of yurushimasen, the polite negative of yurusu, gives a powerful and dignified effect.

Cure Beauty YurushimasenNot to be confused with: Urusai! →

Upside-Down Japanese: how the textbooks are teaching you wrong

Grammar
Japanese is so much harder when it's explained like this! Here's how to flip it right-side-up!
Japanese is so much harder when it’s explained like this! Here’s how to flip it right-side-up!

In learning Basic Japanese Grammar, you will use standard texts like Genki or Tae Kim. And you should. They are very useful and thorough.

However, there are a number of things they don’t explain. They tend to treat Japanese grammar as if it were West European grammar. With the same categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives. This is helpful for grasping the concepts. I do recommend reading the “classic” explanations (if you haven’t already) along with our articles.

But…

The “classic” Western-grammar-based explanations do falsify Japanese to some extent and this makes it much harder to get an intuitive grasp of the language.

In many cases, because Japanese is presented in terms of European grammar and English uses, it is turned upside down and becomes near impossible to understand correctly.

Simple explanations like

コーヒーが好きです
(watashi wa) koohii ga suki desu
X I like coffee

日本語ができます
(watashi wa) nihongo ga dekimasu
X (I) can speak/understand Japanese

are unfortunately just plain wrong and confusing. They do not represent what the Japanese is actually saying. They represent what an English speaker would be saying in a similar situation.

If we were translating an anime for an English audience, this would be fine. But when students are told that this is what the Japanese means, it lays the ground for confusion and difficulty, especially at a later stage when things get more complicated.

For example, it sows complete confusion about how the ga-particle works. And the ga-particle is the single most fundamental element in Japanese. There is a “ga” in every Japanese sentence whether we can see it or not. Ga is always there, either implicitly  or explicitly, or else it is not a sentence.

If we are confused from the beginning about what ga actually does (and the “translations” above create exactly that confusion), the very clear and simple structure of Japanese – one of the most regular and logical languages in the world – becomes obscured.

So how do we turn Japanese the right way up in our minds?

We just need to learn a few simple facts about the language that the textbooks never teach.

Because there is such a need for this information, we have put these facts into a very short concise little book called Unlocking Japanese. It isn’t another heavy task to add to your study schedule – it is a simple, clearly written book that you can read in an evening (though you will probably want to go on referring to it for years).

It takes you in a clear step-by-step way through the “hidden” basics of Japanese that the schools don’t teach.

If you don’t know any Japanese grammar this isn’t the book for you, but if you know even the very beginnings you should read this, because it is going to make every step easier and much clearer.

If you have been studying Japanese for years, Unlocking Japanese will make a lot of things fall into place. Intermediate Japanese learners report that the book is full of “Aha!” moments.

We apply the knowledge contained in Unlocking Japanese throughout this website, but we highly recommend reading the book first because it prepares you in a systematic way for so much of what we have to tell you here.

Japanese Reading: The Fox Children

Reading Practice

Japanese-reading-little-foxesIf you were looking for something cute and interesting to read in Japanese, here is today’s recommendation, picked from one of the many free sources in The Dollygram Resource List.

This is a story about the real life of a wild fox family in Japan. The writer is an excellent photographer, and the story is illustrated with lots of photographs of the real fox family in the wild and on the margins of human habitation.

It is suitable for intermediate Japanese acquirers. You can use Rikaisama for “furiganizing” where necessary. As usual I recommend turning off definitions or putting Rikai into Sanseido mode. Sanseido mode gives simple Japanese definitions, and you may be surprised how often, even when you don’t know a word, you can manage with the Japanese definition on the fly.

If you need to make the text bigger – and you do need larger text in Japanese for the same reason small children need large-print books – remember that in Firefox you can set the zoom to adjust the size of the text only – without messing up the pictures.

Go to the 表示 menu (“View” if you still have your Firefox in English), scroll to the ズーム (Zoom) popout and check the last item, 文字サイズのみ変更 (のみ is written-instruction-speak for だけ), which will be “Change character size only”, or something like that, in English.

You can then zoom the text size up and down without affecting anything else on the page and making everything look like a mess!

Here is the story:

The Fox Children (子ぎつね、こんこん、ロリこんこん)

Note: this is a longish story, so if you aren’t used to reading a lot of Japanese at a sitting, don’t be afraid to take it in smaller  chunks and make it a daily treat!

Happy reading!

 

Japanese Grammar: The Golden Key – Mighty Morphin’ Modularity

Grammar
Japanese Grammar is like morphing lego-blocks. Once you know how they fit together you can build anything!
Japanese Grammar is like lego blocks. Once you know how they fit together you can build anything!

We sometimes liken Japanese to an RPG. A great open world where there are many things to see and discover, treasures to be found and monsters to overcome.

In some RPGs (like the Dragon Quest series), at a certain stage you can get a master key that will unlock lots of doors and treasure chests without your having the particular key for that item.

There is a key like that to Japanese grammar. It won’t unlock every door, but it will unlock a lot of them.

This key is the modular nature of Japanese. We learn early on about “conjugations” of Japanese words, but the truth is that while conjugation does exist in Japanese (for example, putting verbs into the past tense) much of what is called conjugation is not conjugation at all. It is something else that doesn’t really happen in European languages, but because textbooks and teachers describe Japanese in terms derived from Europe, it is never properly explained.

In Japanese words don’t only conjugate. They also metamorphose (or “morph”) into completely different kinds of words. Verbs regularly become adjectives, ichidan verbs become godan verbs, adjectives become verbs, nouns become adjectives.

You may be only partially aware of it because current Western teaching does not draw much attention to the matter. And it may sound very complicated and strange, but in fact it is very simple once you understand it.

Many of the things that are done in English by adding three or four extra words are done in Japanese by morphing the word into a different type of word meaning what the English phrase would mean.

The good news about this is that Japanese is almost 100% regular. Once you know how these metamorphoses work, you can build just about any meaning by morphing and lego-ing words and phrases together by methods that almost never change.

This is completely different from English and other European languages, which are a maze of exceptions and special cases where you have to learn many many things individually.

In Japanese, once you know how your box of lego-pieces works and how they morph and fit together you can construct just about anything.

Before you are ready to do this, you need to learn a few other things the textbooks never mention.

That is why we recommend that you read Unlocking Japanese, which leads you step-by-step to the point where you can use the Japanese morphing system like a pro.

Mighty Morphin’ Modularity is the ninth chapter of the book and by the time you get to it you will be ready to use everything in it.

Unlocking Japanese is a short book that you can read in an evening and grasp the essential points, but you will want it by you for a long time afterward because it gives the keys to understanding Japanese that the textbooks don’t teach.

Urusai: What does it really mean?

Japanese word meanings

meaning-of-urusaiUrusai is a word you encounter a lot in anime and manga.

The most usual translation is “Shut up!” and if it is said (or shouted) on its own, it is pretty much the exact cultural equivalent of “Shut up!” However, the meaning is not identical.

This article in video mode:

The actual meaning of the word is usually given as “noisy” and that is very much the sense of the term, especially if we remember that “noise” is essentially unwanted sound.

We can describe noisy traffic as urusai; we can also describe a person who is too fussy as urusai. For example, we can even say that someone is “urusai about her clothes” – fussy about them. Again, the sense is that she makes too much “noise” over them.

So when urusai is used in the “shut up” sense, someone is essentially saying “Your words are unwanted sound”, thus “I don’t want to hear this”. Unlike “shut up”, urusai is not directly an order to stop talking, but a statement of one’s feelings about the talking.

Perhaps the second most common usage in anime (after the shouted “urusai!) is “urusai na”. The “na” in this case is a marker for a feeling expressed to oneself (though it may be “expressed to oneself” for someone else to hear). An English equivalent might be “what a noisy person!” – or possibly something less polite along the same lines.

Note: this word is sometimes confused with Yurusanai, which also tends to be angry but is quite different.

The “feeling of sounds” is more important in Japanese than English, and that “sai” ending gives the feel of an excessive/unpleasant sensation, as in kusai, “smelly”, and extensions like mendokusai, “troublesome” (literally: “stinking of too-much-effort”).

Interestingly, while urusai is always negative, it isn’t necessarily critical. When I was in Japan recently we were in the direct path of a typhoon. We got torrential rain, as well as continual news reports and warnings about the incoming windstorm. For a while the television seemed to talk about nothing else.

However, at the last minute the typhoon changed course and veered northward toward Tokyo. The weather cleared up and went back to early-Fall sunshine and warmth.

My host mother commented:

テレビはうるさかったね。

“The television was urusai, wasn’t it?”

I don’t think she was criticizing the television at all. The typhoon was coming right at us and they would clearly have been failing in their duty if they hadn’t given warnings and news about it.

If the typhoon had hit us, she would certainly not have described the television as urusai. But as it happened it didn’t, and all that commotion turned out to be unwanted/unneeded “noise”.

In English she might have said “Well, that was a big false alarm, wasn’t it?” The use of urusai here represents the “false” (therefore unnecessary) part.

It was an interesting example of the fact that while urusai always means something negative, it doesn’t necessarily imply adverse criticism of the source of the “noise”.

 

Not to be confused with: Yurusanai! →

See also

Oishii: what does it really mean?

The Simple Secret of Sou (“seems like” or “I heard”): “Complex” Grammar Made Easy

Grammar
Don't be confused. It all makes sense once you know!
Don’t be confused.
It all makes sense once you know!

Putting sou da/desu on the end of a word can represent either hearsay or similarity. Which of the two it means depends on seemingly subtle and arbitrary grammar rules.

But actually that confusing “list of rules” boils down to one simple secret.

Every grammar explanation I have seen makes it seem that there is a complex set of rules that just happen to be what they are and all you can do is learn them by brute force.

But that isn’t really true. Like much of Japanese, the rules make perfect logical and intuitive sense once you understand them.

Tae Kim’s excellent site gives a run-down of all the rules. I won’t try to explain them here. Tae Kim, or your textbook, is much better at that sort of thing than I am. I am just a doll.

What I am going to do is tell you why those rules actually make sense and are not just an abstract set of rules to be learned.

For example, Tae Kim tells us that for the “seems like” meaning:

  1. Verbs must be changed to the stem.
  2. The 「い」 in i-adjectives must be dropped except for 「いい」.
  3. 「いい」 must first be conjugated to 「よさ」.
  4. For all negatives, the 「い」 must be replaced with 「さ」.
  5. This grammar does not work with plain nouns.

One might also add that na-adjectives have the sou attached directly to them (rather than having putting da/desu between the adjective and the sou as you do when you mean “I heard that…”)

But the truth is that once you know what you are actually doing when you are doing all this,  it all becomes very easy and intuitive, and there are no “rules” to remember.

“The Simple Secret of Sou” is chapter 8 of Unlocking Japanese. You do need to have read the previous chapters to grasp what it is saying, but the whole book is very straightforward. You can read it in an evening and Japanese will become simpler, and more intuitive for the rest of your life.

The simple secret of sou is part of a ground-breaking new way of seeing Japanese that simplifies not just sou, but everything! If you are serious about learning Japanese you owe it to yourself to learn the secrets that make it easy and intuitive.

Ojousama: the Aristocratic Young Lady and Her Kanji

Kanji
Ojousama: a complex character but fine when you get to know her
Ojousama: a complex character but fine when you get to know her

A lot of people consider Ojousama to be a complicated character, and if you look at her portrait to the right you can see why.

The central part of お嬢さま ojousama is 嬢 jou (the rest is simply honorific o and sama, of course).

It is one of the more complicated kanji. Its right-hand section consists of 六 six, 井 well and the regular truncated form of 衣 clothes.

(If you want to know why a well looks like 井 you may want to go to this post on the forums.)

The right section together means “soft” and is a bit obscure. So we are going to associate it with ojousama herself:

ojousama-by-the-wellOjousama is a young 女 lady in beautiful 衣 clothing who comes upon 六 six 井 wells.

If we remember this little story we can remember Ojousama and we can use her to remember the other kanji in which her right-hand element appears. The most important of these is 譲 which we find in 譲る yuzuru which means to hand over or yield.

譲 is the Ojousama kanji with a word 言 as its left, type-defining radical, instead of a 女 girl. When Ojousama 言 speaks in her gentle voice, people hand over anything she wants. It is love, not usury (sound-mnemonic).

Another word with the Ojousama kanji is 醸 which means “brew” both literally (brewing wine or beer) and figuratively, (to cause or bring about, as in English “brew trouble”). This is the Ojousama right hand with 酒 sake, alcohol (without its own left liquid-definer) its left, type-defining, radical.

In the old days, brewing wasn’t done in factories but was a woman’s job. Ojousama is a fine lady and one of her activities is brewing fine sake.

There are other kanji with Ojousama’s right-hand side. We don’t need to learn them all now. In fact we don’t need to learn any of them now unless we want to. We can just learn Ojousama, and pick up the others as we come to them (譲る yuzuru is a particularly useful one).

This is a good example of how using the organic method of learning kanji, we often take the first or most striking or picturesque word that we come across using a particular kanji sub-section and then use that to remember other words with the same sub-section.

六Six wells? Don’t magical things come in sevens? Actually Ojousama herself is the seventh 井 well, because she is so well-衣 dressed.