For me, it was “例えば” and “確かに.”
I kept hearing it over and over again during a Hanasukai session at my local Japanese Association, and had no idea what it meant.
But now I know it means “For example” and “Indeed,” so I’m using it whenever I can.
Definitely felt like I’d filled a gap in my vocabulary bank.
P.S. If you love learning new phrases or just want to practise speaking with others, I’m part of a Japanese learner community where we share tips ranging from vocab, grammar, and more.
by ErvinLovesCopy
27 comments
These little words are great. I highlight them for my students when they come up.
For some reason I didn’t know 前代未聞 and ガチ. They are used all the time. I must have just tuned them out.
The difference between 地下 and 地中, I haven’t seen western resources teaching it properly and I confused my Japanese conversation partner when I misused it.
Both these words can be translated as underground, but 地下 means “inside an artificial underground construct, like basement or metro” (can also be used to name this room/area), 地中 means “inside the ground, buried”.
Mina san!
I kept hearing it and thinking, “Wow! Mina seems to be a very popular name!” Turns out, it is a way of addressing people as a whole, like “Ladies and Gentleman” 😅
It was なるほど.
【ひさしぶり】(hisashiburi)
Meaning: a long time (since the last time); first in a long time.
“X”について – it means “About X” (X being a certain topic, of course). Ever since I learned about this I find it everywhere and I’m always a bit giddy when I understand what it means :p
My old workplace used 了解 (りょうかい) to confirm that they’ve acknowledged something, granted that it was a gaming company and formalities weren’t so rigid.
When I moved to another gaming company, they did not like that I used the above and told me to use 承知いたしました (しょうちいたしました), as they’re a bit more strict.
The usage of 承知いたしました moved with me in my current company and I do use it a lot when speaking to clients, so yeah, that helped me out somewhat.
I took almost four years to learn that you CAN’T use だ after an i-adjective, instead of it being optional in casual speech like with nouns.
How would you write that in romanji? I’m learning but don’t know how to read it yet. Thanks for sharing!
Quoting phrases with ということ
I mean descriptively quoting not a literal speech quote
It was brought up in genki but then I feel like it wasn’t used enough. Whereas in normal conversation it’s in every other sentence, I feel sometimes
For me it’s the っけ grammar. I’ve seen it a ton in the wild but never realized it was a grammar structure until a few months ago. It seems super useful when you’re chatting in Japanese too! I wish I knew it back when I went to JP EN language exchange events
しょうがない helped with acceptance of circumstances
Man I’ve struggled with learning so many words/kanji because my brain just forgets it 2 seconds later. Recently learned these two and I’m surprised I didn’t remember/know them. あなた方 and 囁く
前言撤回 – Which I only say because I had a full-on Basder-Meinhof experience with this one.
For me it was an obvious one – “それはそう” meaning
“Thats how it is”
Been using it daily ever since.
Also just using “でしょう?” as a “right??” took me too long.
I heard them so many times in anime that I instantly got the meaning when I learned them
For me it was 念の為 which means just in case and it is extremely useful to
a) show your colleagues that you double and triple check everything to make sure it’s correct
b) makes people less likely to be openly angry at you for bothering them if you check basic information for the n-th time.
やっぱり is one of those words that textbooks aren’t interested in teaching but the minute you engage with any kind of podcasts/radio you hear it every two minutes.
There’s this word “ぜひ” I think it usually means “by all means!”. I’m still not sure about the meaning tho. But I really like how it sounds lol
ために opened up so many doors for me. Recently though, I learned 少々 is just kenjougo for ちょっと makes the phone calls make more sense 🤣
Be careful of Tashika (ni)
Japanese textbooks and Japanese teachers and even some Japanese natives will tell you that it means you are certain about information, and not guessing.
But it is used routinely to refer to things you think are true, but you also know might not be true.
There are lots of places where natives absolutely ‘know’ 100% a meaning of a word or phrase, and yet use it pretty differently regularly
I’d even say that in speech tashika ni always means ‘not really sure’, instead of ‘certain’
There is a weird analogy lurking in there.
に
i’m still asking myself why I didn’t learn this earlier, and why I don’t know it yet
I had leaned N5 and gone to language school in Japan for four months before a hot wild “おすすめ” appeared in the 作文テーマ for a test.
意味不明
I always really liked あさって、さらいしゅう、さらいげつ、さらいねん and soforth
I only know english, so learning that Japanese has specific words for these concepts really opened my mind and made me appreciate the language and culture more. Idk it just stuck with me.
A lot of うん