Naturalness Meter: High Vocabulary Expectations: country names, job titles, basic pronouns, basic greetings, several surnames. Expression Expectations: honorific suffixes (-san, -kun, etc), pronoun omission. (Starting with this session, I’ll use dots (.) to separate kanji readings: 写真 sha.shinn)   Happy 11.11.11… Well not anymore when this session is actually published. Oh well, happy veteran weekend [...]

Naturalness Meter: High Welcome back to Chalkboard. Let’s continue what we learned last time and take a look at だ’s polite form today. Desu Before we get into the when’s and where’s, let’s understand what this “polite form” is first. Polite speech, or 丁寧語 (tei-nei-go), refers to a group of verbs, nouns, adjectives and indicators [...]

  Last time we went over mainly the writing part of Kanji. Yes remember pictograms and ideographs and all those fun we had? Today I’m going to dive deeper into a special area about Kanji that you’d have to pay special attention to. It’s what confuses most people – the reading of kanji. Like we [...]