Trying to write a post on the の particle has been quite the challenge as there are so many uses for it. Often times, I would read an article and be like, “Ok cool I got it” - only to discover a myriad of other uses I didn’t know about. There are a variety of uses I’m not going to write below as I’m still learning them - but I want to write down the ones I think I understand and can describe to some degree ^.^

In English, an adjective is something that describes a noun. Adjectives either go directly before the noun (“It’s a hot day”) or they come after the verb “to be” (“The day is hot”). In Japanese, the core idea is similar - but there’s some pretty funky differences - such as the fact that some words can be their own sentences and some words that we might think of as adjectives in English aren’t really adjectives in Japanese. Let’s dig into this below!

Recently I’ve begun noticing how important it is to know how to conjugate Japanese verbs. For instance, even though I may know the verb 食べる (to eat), I didn’t know how I would change that if I wanted to say something like, “I ate” or “I will eat” or “I did not eat” or even “I want to eat.” I began trying to look up some rules and wow was it difficult to find beginner friendly places! Below I’ll talk about the three groups of verbs I learned about and what places I found useful or not.

Last week, I wrote a post about how I was excited to find Quizlet and how cool of a product it was. Yet, within a week, I’ve switched to something that in almost all ways is inferior. Let’s discuss why!

When I was learning その, I came across a lot of sentences that included てもいい at the end of the sentence. I was pretty confused what that meant even when I saw the translation. I spent a good amount of time today trying to wrap my head around how this is used and how to translate sentences that have てもいい in them. I’ll try my best to explain what I learned below!

In the last post we talked about this (これ) and that (それ and あれ) in Japanese. However, those words we talked about do not work if we wanted to say “this book” or “that umbrella” in Japanese. Why not? What should we say instead? Below we’ll go into more detail!