Have you taught a native speaker something about Japanese?

Japanese
#1

(and if so, share here)

They say that the only way to fully understand something is to teach it. I am years away (if ever) from fully understanding Japanese (I failed the N4 exam in 2025), but I tend to overthink small things, and I have had multiple cases where I shared an epiphany with my (native Japanese speaking) partner, and she said “wow, I’ve never thought about it that way.” To be fair, there are also plenty of times where she has said: no, you are wrong. :joy:

As a side note, the same thing has happened in reverse. She often asks me something like “what is the difference between these two English words?” And I realize I can’t explain it, so I have to stop and think hard, and sometimes even consult a dictionary. Result: I learn something about English!

If others have similar stories, please share them in this thread. I can’t think of specific examples right now, except for this one because it happened very recently:

The word なくなる does not need to be memorized, because it is literally just ない (not existing, in adverbial form なく), with なる (to become) attached. Thus it means “to become not existing”. Or, to disappear.

Even better, I presume this framing explains why なくなる is translated as the polite “to pass away” (compared to 死ぬ translated as “to die”). The LLMs agree with me, but maybe we’re wrong.

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#2

I also like 命を落とす

This post also reminded me that I probably should restart doing Italian lessons with my Granny. She always asks me something, and I’m like “idk, let me check it for us both”. Now, when I can do CI without stopping every few seconds, I think it will be even more fun, because for Granny it’s fun to have lessons with me, and for me it’s a really good practice to produce speech with as few errors as I can (I’m getting enough rough, pretty unfiltered output so far)

I also have a mentee in Japanese, and oftentimes it’s really hard, something like “what is the difference between 芸術 and 美術?” And I can go like “The first seems more universal, and it’s easier to use, while 美術 might sound cringe(mb?) or pretentious (mb?)” than I google it, and it’s basically that 芸術 is all kinds of art, and 美術 is fine arts “but it still should have that strange feeling of not being used, right, right?” I’m not sure, maybe it has that nuance where I exist, maybe not.

Now when I think about it, I really like the sensation I feel when I try to explain something very familiar, but I cannot be sure, or cannot figure it out

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#3

LOL, I haven’t heard that verb yet. I laugh, because I used to skydive a lot (hence the profile pic), and in that community there’s a lot of insider language (and morbid humor) including various ways to say somebody died in the sport. The most common is probably to say that so and so “went in”. I haven’t thought about that in a long time, and I’ve never even tried to analyze it too literally, but I guess it means they “went into the ground (faster than was intended or is repeatable)”. But I feel like your verb works really well in this context too.

I know there are mixed feeling about this, but I have found LLMs to be phenomenal for these kinds of questions. They are often mediocre to poor at providing links to actual authoritative sources to the claims they make, but I’ve yet to find them mistaken about those claims. I consult them for helping to explain fine points of English to my partner (and myself) as well, and again, they are not really ever wrong. This shouldn’t be surprising… they are, after all, language models.

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#4

I actually discussed this extensively with a Japanese friend the other day, although more as a philosophical and translation theory thing (comparing with English terms like ‘art’ and ‘crafts’). There’s quite an interesting discussion to be had about the historical status of certain things as ‘art’ or not in European culture compared to Japanese culture and, consequently, to what extent the modern Western concept of institutional art has an influence on the folk Japanese concept of 美術 and 芸術 (i.e., the way people speak about ‘art’ in their daily life). Short version is that defining these words in English and Japanese is a little treacherous, although that is a more philosophical discussion.

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#5

one of my colleagues complained English was hard because Japanese doesn’t have transitive and intransitive verbs and English does… safe to say I blew her mind lmao

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#6

It’s a bit niche, but the kanji for the Japanese koto is 「箏」, not 「琴」! Even Japanese people get this wrong if they don’t have much experience with the instrument.

(It’s also incorrect on Bunpro, but my report was ignored. :frowning_face: )