The Cunning Linguist

For years I've wondered what "ですかど" means. Its often used in Japanese conversation, joining phrases or at the end of sentences. Every time it's bugged me, there's been something more immediate demanding my attention (like useful everyday phrases; "nice to meet you", "how's the weather?" or "those aren't my undies!!").

Today I found a recording of an interview on Japanese TV with subtitles (in Japanese ... they often do, don't ask me why!). Low and behold, there it was! All this time I've been spelling it wrong; it sounds like "ですかど" but its actually "ですけど"!

Thankfully Minako-san over at "Nihongo day by day" has written a fantastic explanation of the phrase. Minako's site is a veritable Aladdin's cave of everyday Japanese. Every entry is written in both Japanese and English, so you can even learn your Japanese in Japanese! I hope the site is useful to everyone!

PS. Those phrases, if you need them, are "どうぞ宜しく　お願いします", "天気はどうですか" and "その下着は私のじゃないよ!!".

"Passed!" by Mr Wabu.

How do you learn kanji for the JLPT? Until recently I had thought learning each symbol and the various readings was the most thorough and effective approach. Then, since witnessing much better SRS results using sentences and words than individual symbols, I have been thinking about ways to apply a more contextual method to the JLPT kanji list.

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Usually I steer well  clear of the "look, isn't Japan weird" material you can easily find online, but this one is just too special. Thomas over at Babelhut recently ran across a truly unique exhibition at Himeji Museum of Literature. He explains it with far more eloquence and pictorial evidence than I could hope to achieve here, so I'll just recommend that if you're into wacky and you're not just about to eat your lunch, you might want to take a look!

Since we're on blogs, I'd just like to take this opportunity to send a big "thank you" to Geoff over at Confessions of a Language Addict. He's constantly coming at the language challenge from fresh angles, and checking my stats he regularly sends a decent chunk of traffic my way, so if you like it here why not take a look over there and see if there's even more to enjoy!

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